Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  A handful of cash got everyone into VooDoo, including the Chihuahua, who was smuggled in the bag, and Coco, the driver, who abandoned all pretense of working and whipped his shirt off on the dance floor. At one point a member of Renée’s posse, Kevin G. (aka Chickenhead), vomited during an Off the Wall–era Michael Jackson song, and the Chihuahua appeared in the strobe lights and started lapping it up, at which point the bouncers descended and requested that we vamoose, which was fine with me because the outrageous view was offset by the triple-digit heat. By then Renée had heard that Gosling and his posse had gone to Cheetahs strip club, and she informed the bouncers, “We’re outy anyway ’cause we’re going to party with Ryan at Cheetahs and this place is so over so suck on that why doncha?”

  We climbed back in the limo, stopping off at T E HAP IEST P ACE ON EAR H for a re-up, at which juncture Coco climbed in the back and started doing lines off Renée’s stomach, which was reasoned to be the flattest object in the limo. That left the wheel to Kevin G., who was feeling better after relieving his stomach of its contents at the Rio and was driving with great confidence after Renée announced that “No one rolls like the Chickenhead!” I called L’s home phone twice from the limo (she had changed her cell number on me), getting the machine each time and not leaving a message. What I thought I might say if I got her on the phone I’m not entirely sure, since the fact that I was partying in Vegas with a bunch of teenagers wouldn’t have been high on the list of things she was interested in hearing about. I realized that I wasn’t aiding my cause, and making those kinds of calls was probably why staying in would have been a better idea. I knew I needed to get the money and get out of Dodge before I screwed everything up. I did not make good decisions when I was alone, obviously, and the more time I spent alone, the worse that trend got.

  Gosling was not at Cheetahs, a fact we learned after I gave another doorman a fistful of cash and then spread out enough to get everyone in the VIP room, where four things of note happened: 1) Renée convinced Coco that he should quit the MGM and go to work for my plastics company; 2) Coco left a series of messages on L’s machine informing her that, in his opinion, she was making a big mistake choosing an old sack of bones like Boyd Bollinger over a prince like me; 3) a fat Polynesian businessman mistook Renée for a dancer, offered her money for a lap dance, and got a White Russian tossed in his face for his trouble; and 4) we were thrown out of our second consecutive establishment, which is actually difficult to do in Vegas if you’re spending a lot of money (see previous severed-head analogy).

  Once we got pitched from the strip club, Coco gave the limo keys to a homeless guy outside the club as a kiss-off to the MGM. He and the rest of Renée’s “peeps” dispersed one by one, and we ended up taking a cab to the In-N-Out Burger, where I gave Renée a handful of cash and told her to buy dinner for everyone in the place. She put on a paper In-N-Out cap and stood up on a table, yelling, “Yo! Las to the Vegas! Who wants a free Double-Double?” It damn near caused a stampede among the drunks (who else would be at In-N-Out at five A.M.?), and somewhere in the commotion Renée decided she wanted eggs, not a burger, so we wound up eating at Denny’s on the Strip, where I watched Renée stuff as many mini-creamers in her purse as it could possibly hold. This brought tears to my eyes because I was reminded of the five million times L and I had gone to breakfast at the old Majestic Diner in Atlanta, and how she used to peel the lids back and drink the mini-creamers, happily turning them over and stacking them in a pyramid as I smiled at her and wondered how it could be that something so small could be so consistently thrilling to me.

  “I can’t believe Pooh Jeter just moved without telling anybody,” Renée said, polishing off the last of a stack of silver-dollar pancakes. “It’s the sketchiest thing ever. I’m totally going to get to the bottom of this.”

  She whipped out her phone and also pulled an iPad from her purse. Her fingers started flying, and she began scanning her devices and talking to herself.

  “Oh my God, here’s where she met him. Ew. He’s a magician. Augh—she uses the worst filters. Holy moly—that was less than a week ago. They have time to spray-paint a car but not say goodbye? What’s wrong with people? Pooh is crazy. But that can happen when your mom has a bunch of shady boyfriends that don’t always go back to the right room in the middle of the night. ‘Oh, is this not the bathroom?’ As if.”

  She showed me a picture of Pooh Jeter and her magician.

  “God, he’s not even a good magician. Poor Pooh. She thinks that’s all she deserves. That’s what happens. You don’t think you deserve anything. It’s like that story about the guy who’s, like, eating shit for so long. Someone goes, ‘Hey, buddy, why are you eating shit?’ and the guy goes, ‘I’m not eating shit, I’m eating dinner,’ ’cause that’s what he’s used to. That’s a whattyacallit. Story that means something else. I think it is, anyway. It seems like it is. Oh well. So long, Pooh. Hope you like Utah.”

  It had taken her under ninety seconds to figure out precisely where this Pooh Jeter was, whom she was with, and what the circumstances of her leaving town were. It was remarkable.

  “That’s pretty amazing,” I said, wondering for a second where that snake in the grass Boyd had taken L. They had a lot of luggage. A ton of luggage, now that I thought about it. L was a light packer. Why hadn’t this occurred to me when I went over there? I should have focused on the volume of luggage, not the Kentucky Derby mug.

  “It’s easy. I can find anybody.”

  “What if they don’t do any social media?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Their friends probably do. You can’t hide anymore, Raoul. People will find you,” she said, looking at me in what I felt was a meaningful way.

  Renée got up to go to the bathroom. For a second I wondered if she knew I was a fugitive, then I decided I was being paranoid. I paid the check and walked outside onto Vegas Boulevard in the full brutal light of morning. I watched as an obese bearded man in a red visor and powder-blue tracksuit hauled a wheelchair out of a white van and set in on the sidewalk in front of the curved covered driveway leading to the Imperial Palace. The pain was returning, so I popped a couple more pills and watched him waddle over to the passenger side of the van, where he emerged carrying a cripple who appeared to be about my age and looked like Howie Rose, my old best friend who had been paralyzed after falling out of a tree while playing flashlight tag in the summer when we were nine. The cripple’s arms, legs, neck, and hands were twisted in every direction, and the guy carrying him dumped him in the wheelchair with all the care of a gardener tossing a sack of fertilizer into a toolshed. He made his way back to the van and grabbed a plastic bucket, a name tag, and a new straw cowboy hat. He set the bucket in the cripple’s lap, attached the name tag to the cripple’s ratty pearl-buttoned western shirt, set the hat crookedly on the cripple’s head, and hauled himself back into the van, where he squealed off into the Imperial Palace driveway.

  Renée came walking out of Denny’s, and we crossed the street to catch a cab at Caesars. I couldn’t stop turning around to look at the cowboy cripple. I thought of Howie Rose. I thought of the beam from the flashlight that cut across the lawn after he fell out of the tree. And the way tears rolled down his cheeks that one time I went to visit him, though he couldn’t move to wipe them and seemed to know I wasn’t coming back after that first visit. The longer I looked at the cripple, the more I thought that it might actually be Howie Rose, so I raced back across the street to get a look at his name tag. It read Cowboy Bob. His eyes were vacant and moist, just like Howie’s were. I said “Howie? Is that you?” He just looked at me with those eyes. He couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to do but stick a $100 bill in his bucket. Renée started hollering, “Raoul! Vamos!” so I ran back across the street, where we hopped in a cab.

  I looked back across Vegas Boulevard, where the fat guy in the tracksuit had reemerged and was reaching into the bucket with a heavy paw. He held the hundred up to the sun, inspecting it, then looked around suspiciously be
fore stuffing it in his pocket and disappearing into O’Sheas. I had the urge to get out of the cab, to go back, but I didn’t, partly because I didn’t know what I would do, and partly because none other than Bing Buli was walking past the guy on the other side of the street, studying each foot of sidewalk like I might be hiding in a crack. He was either wearing shorts that were a foot too long or pants that were a foot too short. I ducked down in the cab before he could see me. I cursed Maurice in my mind for a second, and then I thought that I had clearly dodged a bullet, had just survived the impossibly long odds of ever running into Bing Buli in a town the size of Vegas, and proceeded to forget about him entirely. I surely didn’t waste any bandwidth beating myself up over the fact that he was so out of sorts that he had flown across the country to scour a strange city on foot on the off chance that he could get his hands on his old friend.

  Renée put her head in my lap and fell asleep. I absently brushed her hair, imagining that I was back in Cabbagetown and L had fallen asleep watching one of her favorites, The Purple Rose of Cairo. I held the thought for a long while, imagining Mia Farrow staring at the movie screen in the film and me staring at the freckles on L’s face in the same wondrous way. I kept petting Renée’s head as the sun bore down, and then I closed my eyes. It was time to call it a night.

  MR. PARISI

  May 22

  I want to kill him with my bare hands. It’s just that simple.

  I WOKE UP LATE THE next afternoon on the couch in the suite. I had never felt worse in my life. There was no way to determine how much of the agony was from my bronchitis and broken bones and how much was from the night before, when we’d drunk roughly half the agave extract of central Mexico and inhaled the entire gross national product of Bolivia. My wrist was throbbing away, my stomach was churning (think Denny’s Grand Slam in a bingo tumbler), and my throat felt like it had survived a dull guillotine. It was abysmal and depressing. I had tears in my eyes. The sun was already setting through the windows. The dimming desert was endless. Was this any way for a millionaire to feel?

  I made it into the bathroom, dry-heaved, then stuck my mouth under the faucet and managed to get down a couple of painkillers. Renée was passed out on a chaise longue, her stomach caked in so much drug residue that she looked like one of the natives on Kurtz’s island at the end of Apocalypse Now. I crawled to the couch and went back to sleep, and the next thing I knew, I was being awakened by a horrible shrill clinking sound. I looked up to see Renée standing over me, banging a fork on a wineglass and looking none the worse for wear. Never had the difference between thirty-five and eighteen been clearer.

  “Rise and shine, Buster Brown.”

  I squinted up at her. She was wearing a bubblegum-pink thong and bra, and her hair was wet. It was like waking up in a beer commercial.

  “Who are you, and how’d you get in here?” I said.

  “What?”

  “How did you get in this room?”

  “I, like, came with you! You don’t remember me?”

  “Are you Pooh Jeter?”

  “Pooh Jeter? Pooh Jeter moved!”

  I would have kept it up but was restrained by the fact that she was about to start crying and I was about to vomit. One of those things will pretty much put the kibosh on any protracted jocularity, and two of them, forget it.

  “I’m joking, Renée. It’s a joke.”

  “Well, sometimes your jokes are for the birds.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Do you remember what you promised me today?”

  She put her hands on her hips, reached behind her back, popped off her bra, and slid out of her underwear, all of which took about three seconds. Her skin was as taut as an extended rubber band. I mean, if you followed Renée around with an airbrush all day, you probably couldn’t find anything on her body to touch up. I had no doubt that her ex-boyfriend spent many nights polishing his hunting rifle and thinking about that very fact.

  “I’m gonna take a hot tub. Get up off the thingamabob and come in with me. I’ll wash your hair. And you said you’d take me to the Forum Shops, by the way. Like, at Caesars.”

  “I know that,” I lied.

  “Come on, old man.”

  Renée reached out her hand and pulled me up. Her strength surprised me, not to mention her comfort level with thorough nudity, which was yet another trait that reminded me of L. You’d think, Oh, she’s a lawyer, she must be uptight (and I realize that the version of L I’m describing here is uptight, at least where I’m concerned), but that was never the case. She was as game as they get.

  I took my shirt off. Renée looked at me curiously. “Why is your chest hair blond and your hair hair isn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s always been that way.”

  “Huh. That’s pretty random. But I kinda like it.”

  We got in the tub, and Renée had me sit in front of her while she poured water over my head and washed my hair, which felt good, as did the pills, which were starting to work their wonder. My chest and throat eased and softened, and my wrist went numb. The world was starting to right itself. My optimism was returning.

  “Who did you keep calling last night?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Did I call someone?”

  “Only about eight skazillion times. It was fishy.”

  “If I could remember, I’d tell you.”

  What an idiot I was. L and the Silver Fox were no doubt commiserating right that very second about her train wreck of an ex-husband calling from the 702 area code. And the creaky bastard would look it up and say, “Honey, that’s Las Vegas,” and then he’d start in on how I was a gambling addict and bring up the credit card debt I had gotten into and probably mention Dawn and Penny just to turn the knife. I could hear it all now. What the hell was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just stay quiet until the plan was executed? And did I have Coco call her? Did that happen? That couldn’t have happened. Not even I was that stupid.

  “How come you remember telling me you’d take me shopping but you don’t remember who you kept calling on the phone?”

  “Maybe I only remember the important stuff,” I said, and then I remembered seeing Bing Buli out on Vegas Boulevard. I decided then and there that I needed to keep it tight for the rest of the time I was in Vegas. No more fucking around.

  “You’re weird,” she said, scrubbing my scalp. “But weird-in-a-good-way weird. A lot of guys are just weird weird. Everybody who comes in the club is just weird weird. Why are you not, like, married or anything?”

  “Do you think it’s weird?”

  “Duh. You’re a total catch.”

  I considered telling her about L. My plan. All of it. But that’s not how it works. You don’t all of a sudden turn into a truthful person just because you’re sitting in a bathtub and have a million dollars.

  “You don’t think I’m a busybody, do you?” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  “OK. Good,” she said. “ ’Cause, like, nobody likes a busybody, and I don’t want you to think I am one. My mother’s one, though. Cheese and rice, is she a busybody! Or at least she was. She doesn’t talk to me anymore ’cause I left Buttholeville and don’t wanna marry Leslie. Close your eyes and let me wash your sweet face. There you go. Leslie eats over there like twelve days a week and calls her Mama and then he calls me and says she won’t let anybody mention my name at the table ’cause I’m like the devil for leaving and not finishing high school and working in that GD factory till I drop dead, like everybody else in that town. He’s always like, ‘Everybody here hates you and I’m never speaking to you again ’cause you’re a bitch for leaving and thinking you’re too good for this place,’ and then he’ll hang up and call back five minutes later and tell me about one of our old friends who got another one of our old friends pregnant or something like that. Like he didn’t just say he was never speaking to me again two seconds before. Sometimes he gets drunk and plays songs we used to listen to over the phone to try and
make me homesick. Like if they’re having a camping party with girls or whatever. He’ll hold the phone while they’re all singing so I’ll get FOMO and want to go back. One thing I learned so far in life is that people who stay places are totally against people who don’t. Everybody always wants you to stay where you are so they don’t feel bad about never doing anything themselves.”

  “It’s not right,” I said.

  “Nope. ’Course, I don’t care, ’cause I’m not going back. Not ever. I want to see things and, like, you know, go somewhere. My mom never went anywhere—that’s why she won’t talk to me. But, I mean, whoever heard of someone not talking to their kid anymore? That’s fucked-up, right?”

  Again I thought of saying something personal, something about my old man, but as always, I didn’t, even though I knew she could have used some support in how she was feeling. She was only eighteen. She was putting on a brave face in a new place. She probably knew that Vegas wasn’t going to work out for her and she’d end up back in Ohio. Her fear was transparent beneath her attitude. She wouldn’t dance, and the money went to girls who would dance. And the money gave you freedom. Or at least more freedom than you had without it. I knew she’d either end up back in a dirty house with deer heads on the wall or on the stage herself. But I didn’t mention any of this. I merely nodded and agreed. “Yes,” I said. “It’s very fucked-up.”