But that moment had made my career, like I said. It immediately led to a book deal and a lot of offers to deliver commencement speeches, which is pretty ironic, since someone who’s never finished anything probably shouldn’t give life advice to a bunch of people who just did. I guess it doesn’t matter, since I never took any of the speech offers and ended up returning the advance from the publishing house because I never got around to writing anything. L and I did go out to LA for a summer when a producer set me up with a screenwriter to work on a script about my life story, but we never really got past the one scene we had with the LLWS speech in it (and an opening sequence based on a debacle with a skywriting pilot when I first proposed). I ended up spending most of my time in Cali drinking beers and learning how to surf with the writer’s brother, Cyrus. I really loved it out there, but L hated Southern California and wouldn’t even consider a conversation about staying and practicing law there. She said New York had suffering, which she could deal with, but LA had despair, which she couldn’t. She also noted that while New York serial killers were usually pasty white loners like Mark David Chapman and David Berkowitz, only California could produce the Manson family.
When we got back east, ESPN seized on my sudden popularity and gave me a kind of adventure show, which, if you never saw it, was a cross between your average sports fan’s wish-fulfillment fantasy and Jackass. Among other things, I ran with the bulls in Pamplona; spent an entire day drinking with Manchester United fans on the eve of the Premier League championship; competed and threw up at the Coney Island hot-dog-eating contest; and tore my rotator cuff in the hammer throw as a guest and competitor of honor at the Scottish Highland Games. I was reminded of some of these things as I watched the TV, since clips from my show followed the footage of my LLWS speech. And then the Belmont Park footage followed that, because apparently it was the fucking Ray Parisi Hour in my old studio. I mean, I know it was the dog days of summer in sports, with football not yet begun, the NBA and NHL playoffs over, no Olympics, and baseball lumbering through its season, but it still seemed excessive. I mean, I hadn’t pulled an OJ, for Christ’s sake. I went on tilt a little at a racetrack. Big deal. Show some goddamn Wimbledon highlights, why don’t you.
“Parisi, who is no longer employed by the network, has been identified as the perpetrator in the bizarre incident out at Belmont Park yesterday,” said my former coworker. “Details remain murky, but we here at ESPN join authorities in encouraging our former colleague to turn himself in to the New York State Police. When we come back, can Joey Chestnut win his sixth consecutive title at this weekend’s Nathan’s Famous hot-dog-eating contest in Coney Island?”
I sipped my drink. Mulled things over. This media outing of me as a fugitive from justice was a bummer, certainly, but not an unforeseeable event by any stretch. I mean, I had Just For Men H-45 on my head. I knew this was a possibility. I put my shades on, walked into a bathroom the size of a studio apartment, and checked myself out from a variety of angles. Brown hair. Sox cap. Sunglasses. Long-sleeve shirt to cover the cast. Shit, I barely recognized myself. I had no reason to worry. I was as incognito as a person could be. Then again, if recent history had taught me anything, it was that whenever I thought I had things under control, I really didn’t. Was I safe, or did I just think I was? If I was going to emerge from this mess as a new and improved Ray Parisi, I needed to start examining things a little more deeply than I normally did. Just an extra step was all it took. If you thought, Hey, no worries, I’m safe, you needed to add a Wait, are you really? beat, then think about whatever that answer might be. It was just a minor adjustment. Really, that’s often all it took to fix things.
After another brutal coughing jag, and with my wrist starting to throb, I went back into the suite and poured myself another vodka pineapple. ESPN had moved on from their All Things Ray segment, thank God, and with nothing but time to kill before the check cleared, I figured I’d head downtown and see about getting some supplies. I was out of weed, out of painkillers for my wrist, and once I analyzed the question of my safety a little deeper, I realized that I could probably use a fake ID of some kind, just to be safe. While I had mastered the art of meeting locals wherever I went, and quickly gaining their trust (and their weed connection), this list of supplies was a bit of a taller task. But then I exercised my new strategy and thought one step further. Was it really such a tall task? This was Vegas, after all, and of all the things a person might be looking for in Sin City, pills and documentation were nothing extraordinary. Getting a passport and some painkillers in Vegas was basically the equivalent to scoring a loose joint in Salt Lake City. Problem was, I only had $86. Once again I thought further and remembered Maurice’s Super Bowl bet. Jackpot. I smiled, grabbed the envelope, and headed toward the door, marveling at what could happen, what could open up for a person, with a minor adjustment in act and attitude. One modification and you could go from being broken down to up and running in a flash. It was a beautiful thing, right? It was a beautiful thing.
NOT EVEN AVA GARDNER
March 29
. . . Katherine likes to check in on the stages of grief. It’s become something of an inside joke for us. A way to lighten up the sessions. I think she’s starting to see the entirety of the picture in a way I can’t or am only starting to. She’s really helped me stop beating myself up over not seeing what was happening sooner. I was focused on Mom. As I should have been. It wasn’t my fault. God, I’m so fortunate Grace recommended her. She’s been a blessing. She’s so bright, but her sense of humor really sets her apart from a lot of academics. Today she said that if Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had ever met R, she would have written an entirely different book . . .
TWO A.M. THAT FIRST NIGHT in Vegas found me sitting on a bench on Fremont Street downtown. I was camped out under a sign for fried Oreos, talking to an eightysomething-year-old guy everyone called “The Professor” who had just hooked me up with a whole new identity (because it’s Vegas, your friendly neighborhood counterfeiter is closing in on ninety, and there’s nothing strange about it). I had made the connections I was looking for at the Girls of Glitter Gulch strip club earlier in the afternoon, the day eventually leading me to a couple of different apartments on the outskirts of Vegas, where I was able to use Maurice’s Super Bowl money (the Giants didn’t have the defense to win it all, in my opinion) to procure half a dozen prerolled joints, two bottles of painkillers that were of indeterminate origin but living on the same side of the street as Oxycontin, and the complete identity of one Raoul McFarland, of Omaha, Nebraska. I imagine you’d be hard-pressed to find a family tree anywhere in the world with a branch crooked enough to have someone by that name hanging from it (and if there were a place a Raoul McFarland could call home, it’d be a stretch to imagine Nebraska being it), but there was no getting around the fact that it was a grade-A piece of work by the old man sitting next to me. I had a Raoul McFarland Nebraska driver’s license, assorted cards from local grocery chains and pharmacies, and a faculty ID from the University of Nebraska, as apparently Raoul McFarland was an English teacher, much like The Professor himself had been. With this new tool kit at my disposal, I could very likely weasel my way out of a modest questioning by authorities, provided they didn’t have me dead to rights or ask me about the plot of Anna Karenina.
The strip-club posse I had ingratiated myself with was long gone, bolting with their cash once they dropped me off at The Professor’s place out on Boulder Highway, where I watched a Civil War documentary while he worked on the McFarland portfolio. He had finished up his work well after midnight (and just after Stonewall Jackson had been accidentally shot by one of his own men at Chancellorsville) and come downtown to participate in his weekly poker game at the Four Queens, one that was played by old-timers for small stakes, and one no casino would accommodate unless they played in the early hours of the morning, which The Professor said was fine with his crew, who rarely slept anyway. He wore a blue-and-white seersucker suit and thick-lensed blue-framed eyegl
asses that suggested he was either legally blind or had been at a tag sale at Elton John’s house in the early seventies. His neck was so thin that his head seemed to rest on it like a wedge of cheese on a toothpick. Though he didn’t say five words to me at his apartment, I liked him and was happy to accompany him back downtown before his game started.
We drank a cup of coffee at the Golden Nugget before walking out onto Fremont Street and sitting down. The avenue was nearly empty. With all the lights blazing away, it looked surreal and sad somehow, like an elaborate party that no one had shown up for. Next to our bench, a Mexican maintenance worker scaled a ladder, replacing some burned-out bulbs on Vegas Vic, the iconic smoking cowboy cheerily perched above the Pioneer.
Downtown is the old Vegas that you always see on TV and in commercials, with all those colored lights splashing and zipping every which way. There’s an enormous white canopy about a hundred feet high that stretches over four blocks of Fremont and plays host to laser light shows on the hour, but the reality is that only small-timers and those on the margins go down there, while most everyone else stays at one of the newer joints on the Strip. The city keeps trying to lure people back downtown, but its heyday is not likely to return. It’s more depressing than anything else down there. A quick glance around showed: a bunch of Breaking Bad extras drinking sixty-four-ounce rum drinks out of plastic flamingos; a one-armed man riding a zip line; and two Vietnamese men spraying a chow with gold paint without bothering to cover the dog’s eyes. This was not the kind of place that made a comeback.
I had taken a couple of painkillers with my coffee at the Golden Nugget, but they hadn’t quite kicked in yet, and I had never felt so shitty in my life. My eyes were puffy and bloodshot, my wrist was throbbing, and my throat was so swollen that it felt like I was trying to gulp down a dozen sets of car keys every time I swallowed. The hacking fits had returned, and my chest felt like it was being whacked with a croquet mallet whenever I coughed. I was in the middle of an extended jag on the bench when The Professor patted me on the back and handed me an embroidered handkerchief.
“You need rest and medicine,” he said. “And not the kind of medicine you just washed down with your coffee.” He smiled. Looked up at the awning over the street. “I simply cannot get used to that monstrosity. But of course so much has changed. Downtown and all over, really. The old Overland Hotel, that used to be right over there,” he said, waving a bony finger. “The Sal Sagev there. On the other side of the Horseshoe, where they added on, that was the Mint. That was all long ago, though. You know something, Ray? If you head that way through the desert for a good while, you’ll come across the old nuclear test site at Nellis. When I was in the air force back in the fifties, the Atomic Energy Commission packed all of us soldiers into the area to expose us to the effects. They were called Doom Towns, where we lived.”
“Really?”
“That’s where I met my wife. Can you imagine it? From Dachau to a Doom Town to falling in love in ten short years.”
When he said “Dachau,” I remembered a couple of things the strip club posse had told me on the drive out to his place. One was that he had gone out for breakfast one morning in 1980 and lost his wife in a fire at the old MGM. The other was that he’d been in a concentration camp when he was young.
“She was Miss Atomic Blast,” he continued with a kind of heartbreaking reverence I understood all too well. “That’s what they called the bathing suit contest. Of course, everything then was Atomic this and Atomic that. Atomic burgers. You name it. Peg was Miss Atomic Blast. She won because of her legs, but I tell you, Ray, the special thing was her face. She had a face like nobody’s you’ve ever seen. Not even Ava Gardner could hold a candle to her. She was even more beautiful in 1980 than she was when I met her in 1954. That’s how it is with the great faces.”
I thought about how L had looked a few days earlier when I’d brought Bruce back to the house after the alleged kidnapping incident. Jesus Christ. Was this my future?
“My wife has a face like that,” I said.
“I didn’t realize you were married.”
“Oh yeah. She’s down in Myrtle Beach right now, taking care of her mother. Breast cancer.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah. It’s OK. I just saw her. She’s gonna be, you know, fine. She’ll be fine.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said sadly.
“Everything will be fine.”
He looked at me and patted me on the leg. We didn’t say anything for a while. Just looked at all the sorry lights. Somehow he knew I was lying, but I didn’t care. Maybe this sounds odd, just sitting on some bench on the other side of the country with a ninety-year-old stranger, but it was par for the course for me. I met people easily. They opened up to me all the time. It was very normal as far as I was concerned. It was simply a matter of personality.
I had taken the Myers-Briggs personality test online one lonely night at the Motor Lodge. The roads to the casino were closed due to a major snowstorm (the Sarge had failed to open the package store, which was unheard of), and I was trapped inside with nothing to do but play online poker for worthless credits and take personality tests for both me and L, trying to determine if there was something in our essential makeups that I hadn’t accounted for and that might have something to do with the problems we were having.
On the Myers-Briggs test, I was categorized as an ESFP, and when I took the test for L, she was categorized as an INTJ, which was the precise opposite. All my answers indicated that I was an extrovert and based nearly all of my actions on feelings and instinct rather than on reason and clear thinking. Suggested careers for an ESFP were acting, advertising, and sales, and my closest celebrity comp was Steve Irwin, the gregarious Aussie “Crocodile Hunter” who basically fucked around with extremely dangerous creatures for a living until a stingray decided enough was enough. L’s career suggestions were all much more substantial, and her celebrity comps included no fewer than six US presidents and a variety of other historical heavyweights. After the Crocodile Hunter, I had Arsenio Hall and Kathie Lee Gifford on my team. I chose not to focus on that and instead took solace in the fact that the oldest adage in the world was “opposites attract.” An ESFP was a perfect fit for an INTJ, even if you did answer sixty specific questions in the very way she didn’t.
I turned to The Professor. “You mind if I ask you something?”
“Not at all.”
“Something personal?”
“All the better.”
“What’s it been like since losing your wife?”
He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with a small orange cloth, and placed them back on his face. He sighed. Rested his hand on my leg again. For some reason I covered it with my bad hand, and he gripped my fingers absently. I didn’t mind. It was nice to touch somebody.
“Thirty-six years this November,” he said. “Almost exactly as long as I knew her. That seems impossible. But all the things you think can’t happen, do. That’s the story of life.”
“I’m really sorry.”
He nodded and said nothing.
“Is that when you stopped teaching?”
“And writing,” he said. “I don’t think I ever wrote anything that wasn’t about her in some form or fashion. Colleagues used to tease me about it. After, I couldn’t bring myself to write about her. I couldn’t bear to look at her name. I think I thought if I wrote her name in the past tense, then I would be saying goodbye to her, and I didn’t want to do that. I tried using just her initials once, but that felt ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous to me,” I said.
The pills started to work their magic. The lights seemed to get more intense.
“Do you know what I’ve been doing for the past thirty-six years, Ray?”
“What’s that, Professor?”
“My name is Victor Bellow. You can call me that. She was Margaret Bellow. Peg was.”
Tears started to well up in his eyes,
and then tears started to well up in my eyes, because how many people have you ever seen crying over someone who’s been gone for thirty-six years? Most people will forget you after thirty-six minutes in this life. Thirty-six days if they liked you some. Thirty-six months if they were crazy about you. I pictured myself in thirty-six years if I didn’t get L back. There was no way I would make it. Who was I without her? I tried to put a positive spin on things (in thirty-six years, Boyd Bollinger would be either dead or a vegetable, provided he didn’t live as long as The Professor), but it didn’t work. When you’re away from the person you love, everything is depressing. The best you can do is not think about it and keep working to fix it.
“Mr. Bellow it is.”
“Victor,” he said kindly.
“Victor.”
“What I’ve been doing for thirty-six years, Ray, is waiting. I eat when I’m hungry. Sleep when I’m tired. Play cards on Wednesdays. Help some folks with identification from time to time. But mostly what I do is wait.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“For it to be over, of course.”
“So you can see her again, right?”
He grinned sadly. “And where might that happen?”
I didn’t say anything. It occurred to me that someone who had been in a concentration camp and lost the love of his life in an inferno might not believe in heaven. He looked off down the avenue. I thought I had lost him to memory, but he sprang back.
Swimming with Bridgeport Girls Page 8
