I staggered down Flamingo Road, the lights of the Strip behind me. My lip was split, and I could feel my face swelling up. I started coughing, spat up some blood for a new wrinkle on things, and reached into my pocket for a bottle of painkillers, sitting down on the curb and working the top off with my teeth like an animal. I choked a couple of pills down dry, which I thought was going to make me vomit but merely resulted in more blood being spat out on the road, where cars rushed past and a billboard featuring the magician Pooh Jeter had run off with loomed. In the distance I could see the glowing neon guitar sign in front of the Hard Rock Hotel. I looked in the bag. Fished around with my good hand. I could tell it was light. Instead of twenty straps, it felt closer to fifteen or sixteen. And then it dawned on me. Bing had taken his money and left the rest.
I sat on the curb, covered in sweat. In dirt. In my own blood. My rescue of Howie Rose had ended like everything else had ended. It was a joke, like everything else was a joke. A complete and utter failure brought on by impulsive decision-making and terrible judgment. So what did I do but pull out my phone and make another stupid and impulsive decision.
“City and state, please.”
“Essex Fells, New Jersey.”
“How can I help you?”
“The number for Howard Rose, Senior, please.”
“There’s a Howard Rose on Vine and a Howard Rose on Roseland,” said the operator.
“Rose on Roseland.”
“Hold for the number, please.”
When I heard it, I was struck with another pang of sorrow. It was the same number from when I was a kid. I thought it might be the last thing in the world that hadn’t changed.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Rose?”
“Who’s this?”
“Ray Parisi.”
“Who?”
“Ray Parisi,” I said. “Howie’s friend.”
There was a long pause.
“Dominic Parisi’s kid?”
“I guess.”
“Whaddya want?” he demanded. “I’m going to work.”
“What’s that?”
“I said whaddya want?”
“I was calling about Howie,” I said.
“You’re calling about Howie?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this your idea of a joke, Parisi?”
“No, sir.”
“Then whaddya want?”
“I wanted to know if Howie lived in Las Vegas, by any chance.”
“What?”
“Does Howie live in Las Vegas?”
The line went silent for about five seconds. I thought he might have hung up. Maybe he had done something. Maybe he was responsible somehow.
“No, Howie does not live in Las Vegas. What kinda question is that?”
“Are you sure?”
“He’s been dead for eleven years,” he snapped.
“What?”
“He’s been dead for eleven years. You might have known that if you ever came to visit the kid.”
“He’s dead? How is that possible?”
“Are you on drugs, Parisi?”
“Some.”
“Your father must be proud of you.”
“He died,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“This summer. He died. He left me six hundred grand. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he did that.”
“I don’t know why he did it, either. Now, if you don’t mind, I gotta get to work.”
“Six hundred twelve thousand, five hundred.”
“Wonderful,” he said. “Sounds like you’re spending it wisely.”
“I gambled it all away. Pretty much.”
“Terrific.”
“A lot has happened.”
“What do you want, Parisi?”
“I wanted to know about Howie.”
“Well, now you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He was a really good kid.”
“I know he was a good kid. Think I need you telling me he was a good kid?”
A car sped by. Nearly ran me over. I didn’t flinch.
“I guess you loved him.”
“Of course I loved him. He was my goddamn son, you fucking fruitcake.”
“That makes sense.”
“Not for nothing, but you might want to consider getting yourself some kind of help.”
“That’s probably not a bad idea, sir. I’m a little fucked-up. I lost my wife.”
“Your wife died?”
“No, she left.”
“Well, that happens,” he said.
“That happens?”
“Yeah, it happens. Shit happens. Where the fuck you been you don’t know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want some advice, Parisi?”
“I could use some of that, yeah.”
“Here’s some advice, then: Call somebody who gives a shit. Or go fuck yourself. Either one.”
HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US
September 15
“The Pretender” came on Spotify today when Boyd and I were making breakfast. It was the first time I’ve heard Jackson since I wore out “Late for the Sky” after R and I collapsed. It’s funny how you begin to feel once you’ve healed. I’d thought “Late for the Sky” was the song that would always remind me of R, of what happened to us, but I’m not in that place anymore. In reality, “The Pretender” is the right song for R. I’m even beginning to find some compassion for him in my heart, though admittedly not as much as I wish I could. Anger is such a debilitating emotion. Poisonous and useless and small. I’m trying to let it all go. He was a person who never had a childhood but also never grew up. A person who never knew who he was, or at minimum couldn’t admit who he was. You have to feel a little bit for a person like that, don’t you? To be a person who has to pretend his entire life is beyond sad to me . . .
WITH THE BLOOD DRIED AND the bag of cash in my hand, I wandered about the Hard Rock Hotel in a daze, making my way past a long line of display cases stuffed with music memorabilia. Familiar faces that had beaten Kurt Cobain to the “27 Club” (Joplin, Morrison, Hendrix) gazed out through glass, all of them young and invincible and mere months away from their inglorious end. They were sad to look at, as was a nearby photo of Paul and Linda McCartney, young and sun-splashed and in love. I thought of listening to the Beatles on Saturday mornings in Myrtle Beach. Lucille would make biscuits and sausage gravy and dance around to “I Should Have Known Better” and “Eight Days a Week” and the rest of those jaunty ’62–’66 tunes John and Paul seemed to zip off in their sleep. Thinking of how alive she was in those days before she got sick depressed me even more, and then it got worse when I chanced upon a picture of a boyish and barefoot Jackson Browne sitting in an open van somewhere on the California coast, his silky hair dangling in front of his eyes and the Pacific rolling in behind him. L played “Late for the Sky” nearly every day after she got home from South Carolina, and it was the last music I heard in my old house before the deal went down. The mournful slide guitar on the title track played over and over in my head during those early days at the Motor Lodge and nearly drove me mad with anguish. For my money, there isn’t a song anywhere that’s as heartbreaking as that one.
In the corridor outside the Pink Taco restaurant, a group of impossibly good-looking LA types was loitering around the hallway, talking to Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. He was holding court in front of a cigar shop with a giant mural of Che Guevara on the wall, and one of the hipsters pointed at it and said, “Check it out, it’s that guy from the T-shirt.” Zeppelin poured out of the overhead speakers, Robert Plant wailing about how it’d “been a long lonelylonelylonelylonelylonely time” (no kidding) as I made my way past more cases filled with KISS dolls and Welcome Back, Kotter lunch boxes and kitschy memorabilia of just about every pop icon you could imagine. I had never felt less nostalgic in my life.
The casino itself was like none I’d ever seen. A circular-shaped bar sat in the middle of
the floor as a centerpiece, as if to suggest that gambling was secondary to socializing, and high-cheekboned twentysomethings walked blithely past tables covered in purple felt. Giant blue globes hung from the ceiling in cast-iron casings, and inconvenienced cocktail waitresses strutted beneath them, looking for all the world like they had merely shown up to hang out and suddenly had drink trays thrust into their hands. It was late. Even the people who wanted to be there didn’t want to be there anymore.
Dozens of guys who looked like they didn’t care if they got a good night’s sleep before their next soap-opera casting leaned on the circle bar, scoping out anything that was in possession of breasts and a pulse (the former more of a must than the latter). Behind the front desk, a sign read HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US, and just off the entrance, a cluster of guys who had taken advantage of a “Buy One Hip Black Suit, Get Two Free” sale at Men’s Wearhouse hovered around a glass case containing one of Prince’s outfits from the Purple Rain days.
“Dude was a fucking midget,” one of them said.
“Yeah, but he got a crazy amount of ass,” said another, and they high-fived and headed toward the circle bar.
I walked up to the cashier’s cage and tossed my MGM bag on the counter. The second it landed, Erik, a floor manager with his hair slicked like Michael Douglas in Wall Street, popped up next to me and started a spiel. I let him gasbag for fifteen or twenty seconds before stopping him.
“OK. Honestly, what I want is all of that in dime chips, and that’s it,” I said. “I don’t want any comps. I don’t want anything but to be left alone. If that’s not cool, I’ll go somewhere else, ’cause I don’t give a shit anymore, Erik with a K.”
“Not a problem, amigo,” he said. “But we’ve got to punch some forms for that kind of paper.”
“Tell me where to sign, then leave me alone.”
“Whatever you want, man,” he said, signaling for a cashier to get the paperwork. “We’re all about rock and roll and good times.”
“Good times,” I said.
“Ain’t no other kind.”
“Are you being serious?”
“Like a heart attack, bra.”
“Get the fucking forms, Erik.”
The music was good, the cards were bad, and by four A.M. the money was gone. The end of the inheritance. I sat in a side lounge off the main floor next to the Sports Book and got drunk for a change. It dawned on me fully and completely that it was all over. L and Boyd were getting married. I was broke. The cops would find me anytime. The best I could do was hop a bus to California, or Arizona, maybe, and live out the next fifty-six years of my life as Raoul McFarland. I drank Absolut on the rocks until I was so depressed that all I could think about was dying, and the different ways I might do it, and how all of them were nothing compared to what had already happened. I tried to think of something decent, anything, but nothing came to mind, and for a long time I just sat in the lounge and cried.
At one point a young maid came through with a vacuum cleaner. I had never seen anyone clean a casino before. They were places that just seemed to get spotless in the same way graffiti just seemed to appear on the sides of buildings. It was strange to see it taking place. I stumbled to my feet and tried to help her, but she didn’t want me to.
“I can help. Let me help,” I said, grabbing the vacuum.
“No es necesario, señor,” she said, and backed away from me.
“I can do it,” I insisted. “I can help you. Let me help you.”
“Señor, por favor. Lo siento. No. No, señor.”
The bartender looked over, and I could tell she was thinking about calling security. A grown man, drunk and in tears, grabbing at a vacuum cleaner at the crack of dawn was strange even by Vegas standards, so I did all I could, which was let go and sit back down. I pulled out my phone and looked at it. I wanted to call somebody, but whom? Who was there to call? Messages piled up even as I looked at the screen. Everyone I ever knew had heard about the Belmont Park incident. Friends. Neighbors. People I worked with. All the countless human beings I had met over the years but didn’t really know.
I stared at the screen saver. It was a picture of L when she was three. One Lucille had given me my first night in Myrtle, when we watched The Man Who Never Was and I started to get comfortable in my new life. Then, for some reason, I decided to call the Motor Lodge. I wanted to say something to Maurice. What, I do not know.
“Parkway Motor Lodge.”
“Is Maurice there?” I said.
“Who this?”
“Let me talk to Maurice.”
“Maurice is off, man. This is Angel.”
“Angel. It’s Ray.”
“Holy shit, man! Bro. Bro. You are up in it.”
“You do me a favor?” I said.
“Up in the shit.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m aware of that. You do me a favor or not?”
The maid ran the vacuum past me and did not make eye contact.
“Shit, you gave me that Mookie ball for my brother,” Angel said. “That was straight up.”
His brother, a fan of the ’86 Mets, had been sick during the spring, and I had forged Mookie Wilson’s signature on a ball for him.
“But I ain’t doing nothing illegal,” he continued. “This job is six kinds of bullshit, but it’s all I got.”
“I don’t want you to do anything illegal. I just want you to go to the pound, pick out a dog, and give it to Maurice.”
“What?”
“Maurice,” I said. “I want him to have a dog. It doesn’t have to be big. It can be a small dog.”
“You want me to give the fat boy a dog?”
“Yeah.”
“You kind of a crazy motherfucker, Ray.”
“Can you do it?”
“What it run me?”
“It’s free,” I said. “They’re free.”
“Free I can swing.”
“Get him a nice one. Small. But not mean. Make sure it’s sweet.”
“Sweet?”
“Yeah.”
“You crying, Ray?”
I drained the last of my drink and wiped my face. I had no idea what I was talking about or where the dog thing had come from. Somewhere in my mind, I recalled Maurice saying, “I had a dog once, too.” It must have been that.
“Will you do it right away?”
“I’m on it tomorrow. I’ll take LaLa with,” he said. “She can pick it. I don’t know shit about dogs.”
“Thanks, Angel. And one more thing.”
“Digame.”
“Don’t let the Sarge take any more videos of Maurice.”
“Yeah, that’s fucked-up.”
“It’s so fucked-up,” I said. My voice was shaking.
“Yo, you all right, Ray?”
I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I just stared at the bartender, who was wiping down bottles, and tried to pull myself together.
“And don’t let him shoot any more deer.”
“Yeah, that was fucked-up, too.”
“Listen. You know a girl named Rosario Nuñez, Angel?”
“Don’t know her.”
“From Bridgeport,” I said.
“Uh-uh.”
“She’s dead. She died.”
“Never heard of her.”
“It was in the paper.”
“I don’t read that shit,” he said, and I heard a bell ringing in the distance. “Got enough bad news of my own. Yo, take it easy, Ray. Stay low. I gotta split. But I’m on that dog for you.”
I hung up, wiped my face again, and dumped what was left in my pockets on the table in the lounge. I had a $100 bill, a $20, and a $500 chip that I’d meant to give to my cocktail waitress but hadn’t. I gave the bartender the C-note and walked through the casino. It was late, and barely anyone was left on the floor. I could have cashed the chip in, used the money for a bus ticket, like I said, but I didn’t care anymore. I walked up to my cocktail waitress and was about to give her the chip when she shu
ffled past me and said, “Cool your jets, Tiger. I’ll get to you when I get to you. You don’t need another drink, anyway.”
I sat down in the empty Sports Book and stared at the final scores from the day’s action. There was a time when I would have analyzed things, thought about who I might have taken and why, looked at the futures board, but not now. Now it was just a blackboard with lights. I pulled my phone back out and dialed one more number.
“Yellllo.”
“Is Penny there, please?”
“You’ve got some balls, Ray. I’ll give you that. I wouldn’t mind cutting them off for you.”
It was Dawn’s sister, KC. She wasn’t what you would call a fan.
“That seems extreme,” I said.
“There’s nothing I could do to you that would qualify as extreme, trust me. Been following you on TV, by the way. Nice work. You’ll look great in orange.”
“Where’s Dawn?”
“A lot you care about Dawn.”
“Where is she?”
“Dawn’s not here, and if she were here, she wouldn’t want to talk to you. Listen to me good, Ray. Get lost and stay lost. She finally met what seems to be a halfway decent guy the other day, and you don’t need to be messing it up for her. It’s not like you want her. Do the right thing for once in your life and leave her alone.”
“Is it Ken from the aquarium?”
“Never fucking mind who it— What? No, honey, you need to go to camp. And no swearing like Auntie KC. Swearing is bad. Even if you’re talking to someone you detest.”
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
“There’s no reason for—”
“Come on, KC. Just for a minute. I won’t call again. I promise.”
“She thinks . . . well. We told her some things.”
“It’s OK.”
“Is it OK, Ray? I’m so glad you feel that way. It’s such a relief.”
The black-suit brigade walked through the Sports Book and stared at the board. They argued over Super Bowl future odds, the very bet I didn’t place for Maurice, and took turns farting in each other’s direction and cracking themselves up. I got up and walked back toward the lounge.
“Just let me talk to her for one minute,” I said to KC.
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