(I used to think it was pure vanity that made her do this, but it was something more profound. Her mother once told me that when Claire was three, she came in from the playground crying. Some white kids had called her ugly because of her dark skin. Mom Thibodeaux put Claire in front of a mirror and said, ‘Look at yourself. You’re beautiful.’ She taught Claire to do this, praising her bone structure, her skin color, her eyes, her soul, and her mind. It was this kind of reinforcement that made Claire trust her own judgment of herself, not the judgment of others.)
“You know, I saw that guy once, Kanengiser, but I got a creepy vibe off him and didn’t go back,” Claire said.
“You saw him too? Hey, do me a favor.”
“Yes.”
“When you get home tonight, check your last benefits summary and see how many times you were billed for seeing him. Then call me.”
She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “Sure. Hey, I’m sorry things are so tough for you now, Robin. But maybe things will change soon. I hear Jerry’s in the running for the Berlin bureau chief job.”
“Who told you that?”
“He did. That could get him off your back.”
“He won’t get it,” I said. “But thanks for trying to cheer me up.”
An internationalist wind was sweeping headquarters. Joanne Armoire had spent more and more time overseas before being offered a permanent job in Paris. Turk Hammermill was in Beijing. Now, Jerry was jumping on the global bandwagon.
Although the company had let him fill in in Berlin for six weeks, his dream of getting that job full-time was rather quixotic, I thought, since there wasn’t much chance ANN was going to let one of its biggest moneymakers go to a prestige post in Europe. But Jerry believed he was the right man for the job, and toward this end he had enrolled in Berlitz German, which he practiced on us all the time. He sounded like a man in desperate need of a Heimlich maneuver.
Some afternoons it got really bad. Tamayo, having a nic fit, would be in her office cussing in Japanese, Jerry would be in his office loudly practicing German, and there I’d be, trapped between the Axis powers.
It was not conducive to a Positive Mental Attitude.
Even less conducive was the sudden appearance of Reb Ryan in Keggers, at the bar, right by the door, wedged between Franco and Kerwin Shutz, who hit the bar every night as soon as his show was over. This meant I’d have to go past Reb when I left. There was another exit—an employee exit that required going through the kitchen—but I’d used it one too many times and the Keggers management had asked me to please refrain in the future.
I thought Reb was looking at me, but I couldn’t be sure as he was wearing dark glasses. After one beer, he started compulsively taking them off and putting them back on at five-minute intervals.
“Why does he do that?” Claire said.
“I don’t know. He also hums a lot. It’s really annoying. I think the man is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
“He wants to go back overseas and ANN won’t send him,” Claire said. “But they don’t know what to do with him, at least that’s what I’ve heard. Well, I should go so I can stop at home and shower before dinner.”
I had to go too. I had to pick Louise Bryant up at the office of her agent, Dinah. But first I had to settle the bill, so Claire kissed my cheek and left without me.
I didn’t want to walk by Reb alone, but fortunately a rejected Dillon was also leaving so we walked out together. As we passed Reb, I pretended I was totally engrossed in what Dillon was saying and even put my arm through his in an extra-friendly fashion.
That’s when the fight broke out.
CHAPTER TEN
Eyewitnesses differed about what happened next. Deputy Franco, who was sitting next to Reb, was sure that Dillon had looked at Reb and then elbowed the beer mug out of his hand, sending it crashing to the floor. Kerwin Shutz thought that Reb had pushed his beer mug into Dillon’s elbow.
I didn’t see it. All I saw was the beer flying, and then Reb went ballistic.
“That’s it,” he shouted, jumping down from his bar stool and taking a swing at the significantly taller Dillon, who jerked his head away to dodge the blow. Reb’s fist glanced off my forehead and sent me spinning to the ground. Using a chair as a crutch, I wobbled to my feet. Kerwin grabbed Reb by the arms and tried to restrain him.
“You hit a lady,” he said. “Control yourself.”
For his peacemaking efforts, Kerwin got an elbow in the kidneys. Reb wriggled free and turned away from Dillon to face Kerwin.
A crowd had gathered. People were shouting different things all at once. Mickey the barman was shouting, “Take it outside, for God’s sake.” Franco was shouting “Stop,” but the loudest voices were shouting “Fight!”
Dillon moved away from the fighting and said to me, “Let’s get out of here.”
When we tried to leave, the crowd hemmed us in. The machismo meter was running high in this room and so were emotions. There was a powerful man smell in the room now, sweat and beer and a residual cigar-smoke smell that remained long after Keggers banned cigars from the place two years earlier. It was a heady smell, and I found myself falling under its spell. I was transfixed.
Reb and Kerwin circled. Kerwin jumped around awkwardly, like Ratso Rizzo, took a weak jab, missed, and quickly retreated. They circled some more.
Behind me, I heard Louis Levin and some of the writers giving play-by-play: “Battle of the Emmy winners, television titans, for the Bullshit Belt.” “If Jack Jackson gets wind of this he’ll wanna put it on the air.” “That would solve our ratings problem for the nine p.m. time slot.” Some people were betting: “Twenty bucks says Reb whips his ass.”
Reb faked with his left and slugged Kerwin in the jaw with his right and Kerwin, dazed from the blow, swung wildly and smacked a sports cameraman right in the kisser. Kerwin and the cameraman exchanged blows and Reb, shut out, looked around for someone else to provoke, settling on Franco, who was trying to break up the fight.
“Don’t fuck with me, security guard,” Reb said, scornful, raising his fists. Franco was a big, hulking man, younger, stronger, and taller than the short, compact Ryan. Franco looked like he could squish the Napoleonic Reb Ryan between his thumb arid forefinger.
Reb was trying to provoke Franco, Kerwin and the cameraman were jabbing wildly at each other, there was a lot of shoving around us. Everyone was angry, insecure, and frustrated, and half the people in the bar were probably having nic fits as well. I could easily see this turning into a full-fledged, bottle-breaking bar brawl as all these tense people gave vent to their emotions.
But at that point, Barney Fife arrived to save the day. Waving his gun above his head, Hector made his way to the fight scene to back up Franco, who was rather stoically taking Reb’s insults.
“I’m not afraid to use this,” Hector shouted, and the fighting ceased and the room again fell silent. Franco took his own gun out.
“You’re behaving like a bunch of children,” Hector said. “Now go back to your corners. And play nice from now on. Reb, Kerwin, I think Pete would like to have a few words with you guys.”
“I have to tape a morning promo in a half hour,” Reb said.
“That gives us plenty of time,” Hector said. It was amazing the authority Hector had with a gun in his hand, and how he was able to delegate it. “Franco, take these guys to see Pete.”
Hector, after all, had to make sure Bianca got home safely.
The crowd was starting to break up, disappointed that the fight hadn’t drawn any blood or caused any injuries. Except mine. There was a small lump on my forehead, and the skin had been slightly broken, but it wasn’t serious. After sterilizing the wound with vodka, the bartender gave me a Band-Aid and then Dillon and I left and got into separate cabs.
What was I thinking when I went out with Reb? Reb Ryan was a perfect example of my problem, which is that I tend to exaggerate wildly the fine human qualities of men I admire professionally. I confuse the man wit
h his work. Reb was a dashing figure. During the Vietnam War he’d been in U.S. Army Intelligence, had been captured by the Cong and escaped from a POW camp, winning a slew of medals in the process. When he was discharged, he had put his investigative abilities to work as a war correspondent, and he’d won a ton of awards for his reporting. He had been one of my heroes.
But, once again, it was the control-freak thing. He picked the restaurant, Madras Jewel. When the waiter came over, he insisted on ordering for both of us—in fluent Tamil, which was so pretentious I wanted to barf. Despite my repeated pleas, he wouldn’t tell me what he had ordered, which turned out to be squid curry, using whole squid.
I’m not a big squid fan. I don’t mind the little chewy rings, but I’m always afraid the tentacles are going to sucker on to my lower intestine. I’m not a hot curry fan either. In fact, I do believe squid curry is the food they make you eat in Hell while a pompous ass like Reb Ryan sits across from you for eternity, taking his dark glasses off and then putting them on again every five minutes, telling you about all the beautiful women he’s slept with and all the world leaders who tried to kill him.
I did not kiss him.
While the he-men of ANN were squabbling at Keggers, Louise Bryant had been squabbling with a Teamster. According to her agent, Dinah, Louise had been the aggressor.
“Without provocation,” Dinah said. “He was just walking by and she stuck out her paw and dug her claws into his leg.”
Dinah kept me in her office for an hour while she berated me because Louise was badly behaved. She suggested several courses of action to change Louise’s behavior.
“Can we drug her? Can we declaw her?” Dinah asked.
“No and no,” I said. Louise’s bad temper and claws had saved my life once, indirectly, which is why the bloody cat food company had wanted her for their hero-cats campaign. Louise was very popular. She’d been in People magazine and on a bunch of television shows and she had hordes of fans, so it wasn’t like they could fire her. On that set, Louise was an eight-hundred-pound gorilla.
“Positive Mental Attitude,” I chastised Louise when we got back to East Tenth Street.
I had been thinking of retiring her, but because things were kind of insecure at work, I now felt it was best that she keep her career alive in case mine took another sharp turn south. How sleazy would that be, living off a dumb animal?
I opened the steel door to my building and there, standing next to the mailboxes, was my downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Ramirez, in a housecoat evidently made from the pelts of teddy bears. In the yellow bug light of the hall her normally blue hair glowed green. At her feet, her irritating, pop-eyed chihuahua Senor bared his ratlike teeth and growled his little sissy growl.
As I got my mail, I turned my back and tried ignoring her, whistling a bit, hoping she’d spare me a tongue- and/or cane-lashing. An absurdly futile effort. I heard the thump thump clunk of her cane behind me.
I always start out trying to be nice to her. So I turned and said, “Mrs. Ramirez. How lovely your hair looks tonight. Had your topknot tended today, did you?”
“Did the criminal and the transvestite whore find you?” Mrs. Ramirez shouted. Her hearing-aid batteries were a little low. She always shouted when her batteries were low. She usually keeps her hearing aid turned up high so she can hear what’s going on in my apartment.
“What criminal? What transvestite?” I asked sweetly. Mrs. Ramirez mistakenly thinks I am running a transvestite call-girl ring in my spare time, and thinks every young woman, or man-woman, who comes into the building is a call girl coming to visit me.
“They came by tonight to see you. One right after another.”
“To see Sally,” I corrected. Sally, the witch, did psychic readings out of her apartment and did a brisk business with the demimonde. Young dog-collared rockers and their stripper girlfriends made up a big part of her client base.
“That woman put a curse on me,” Mrs. Ramirez said, accusingly, as though I had something to do with it. Suddenly, she raised her cane.
Instinctively, I put a hand to my forehead to protect the bandaged lump where Reb had beamed me.
“Hit me,” I warned her. “And I’ll put a curse on you.”
Just then, the mysterious, and insanely handsome, guitar-playing man who lived upstairs came around the hallway corner. We had eye contact for one suspended-outside-time moment and then he was out the door and the spell was broken. The guitar-playing man had moved in two weeks earlier, after Mr. Rybynski passed away. As there was no name on the mailbox and the super was in the hospital, I didn’t know who he was. I could have asked the mysterious man himself, but we weren’t yet on speaking terms. About all I knew was that he played the guitar, was about six feet tall and forty-ish, and was really handsome in an offbeat, kind of scary way, with long brown hair, intense brown eyes, and sharp, angular features.
And I knew I liked him.
It was that fabulous eye contact that made me so sure I liked him. It was intense. I mean, really intense, like a cold wind blowing across the moor. I had to force myself not to look back at him. One time I even caught myself involuntarily mouthing the word “hello” at him, and, simultaneously, he mouthed the word back.
Electrifying. Yet, despite my reputation for speaking without thinking, for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him, maybe because of the flashing red lights and alarm bells that went off in the back of my head. Maybe because I was sure I had seen him somewhere before under unpleasant circumstances and until I figured out when and where, I didn’t want to talk to him.
As soon as he was gone, I realized that he had probably heard me arguing with Mrs. Ramirez about whores and curses. What flattering picture of me would he cobble together based on that little exchange, not to mention the bandage on my forehead and my disheveled appearance?
“I saw them, transvestites and criminals coming by all evening,” Mrs. Ramirez continued. “And your aunt saw them too.”
“My aunt?”
“Your Aunt Maureen. Such a good lady. Too bad you don’t have more of that blood.”
“My aunt was here?”
Mrs. Ramirez and Aunt Mo. This is a bad combination, like the meeting of matter and antimatter. As I’ve mentioned, Mrs. Ramirez erroneously believes that I am the Whore of Babylon, that my apartment is a nest of perverts awash in unsafe bodily fluids, and she insists on telling everyone she runs into about my immoral lifestyle.
And Aunt Mo insists on believing everything bad she hears about me.
I was being doubly menaced by evil old women. Two more and it was the apocalypse.
By this time, Louise Bryant was growling testily in her carrier, anxious for her dinner. I often accused her of letting success go to her head, but the truth is, Louise Bryant had always been arrogant and aristocratic, half pugilist, half princess, something I admire in an alley-bred cat.
Senor growled back at her and strained at his leash. I had half a mind to let Louise out of her carrier, as I figured she could take this anorexic gopher in a fair fight. She’d whip his ass. But Senor had a cane-wielding, cat-hating old woman on his side, so it wouldn’t be a fair fight.
“Excuse us,” I said, as politely as possible, and tried to push past her before she blocked my way with her cane. The woman was persistent and it took all my powers of evasion to avoid kicking the shit out of her in self-defense.
Don’t get me wrong. I have a pretty firm policy about not beating the crap out of little old ladies. But in our ten years as neighbors, she’d landed a few blows with that hard oak cane of hers, and I’d had the stitches to prove it. One of these days, I was afraid, she was going to rap my head and I was going to snap.
Today might be that day, I thought.
There was only one way out, a trick I learned when I first moved to New York and was pretty innocent. Street creeps would sense my naivete. Men were always trying to lure me into dubious situations. Pimps would try to recruit me.
Then I learned to scream
. The moment I sensed a guy posed a threat, the very second I realized it, I’d turn, look at him, and abruptly scream like a demon from Hell, “Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaagh!,” scaring the shit out of him. Later, I refined it by looking just past him and screaming. He’d always look behind him, and I’d run away. It was a variation on an old Bob Hope gag.
So I looked beyond Mrs. Ramirez and screamed. Naturally, she turned to see what I was screaming at, and when she did I took off for the stairwell, running a whole flight of stairs with the loudly complaining Louise Bryant thumping in her carrier, before I felt I was out of the old bat’s reach.
It took a lot out of me, but boy, that scream felt good.
“There has to be an easier way to live one’s life,” I said to Louise. I should move to a quieter neighborhood, I thought. I should get into another line of work.
Outside my apartment door I found a basket and a note left by Aunt Mo. The note said, “Hate the Sin, but Love the Sinner,” which is Aunt Mo’s way of saying she cares about me. The basket contained things manufactured by companies owned by Christian televangelist and takeover king Paul Mangecet. Aunt Mo had signed on with the Paul Mangecet people after she learned of his well-publicized attempt to take over ANN, which I considered yet another betrayal but Aunt Mo saw as a way to save me.
Aunt Mo’s already high-pitched religious fervor had gotten a fresh shot of faith when she became an area sales rep for Paul Mangecet, Inc., weight-loss products, a program of high-protein shakes, vitamin supplements, prayer, and an exercise video sold under the name Lose Weight with Jesus, or LWJ.
Lose Weight with Jesus. This conjured up all sorts of blasphemous images in my head, of Jesus in a leotard doing leg lifts and pec flexes on video. I dunno. It was my impression that Jesus loved you even if you were obese, and probably wouldn’t want his name used to peddle 16.6 million bucks a year’s worth of dubious weight-loss products. But Aunt Mo had made a small fortune on LWJ, and this had reconfirmed her long-held belief that God was on her side. Who could argue with profit?
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