Tommy looks glummer than ever. He pokes his cheesecake a couple of times with his fork and then puts the fork down. “I dunno, kid,” he says after a very long silence. “I guess I gotta think about it a little. I never thought about it like that.”
I’m sorry I asked the question. I didn’t mean to make Tommy feel so bad. I only wanted to know what I might have in store for the future. Better to leave it alone now. I try once more to get the waitress’s attention, but she still won’t look at me.
“Excuse me a minute, Tommy. I’m gonna go to the counter and get a beer. You want anything?”
“Nah, kid,” Tommy says, still looking down at his cheesecake. “I got everything a man could need.”
I get up from the table and walk down the aisle past Jack Pirone, who’s sweating profusely, gesturing wildly, and telling a stupid joke.
“Hey, Judas,” Jack says as I try to squeeze by him.
“Jack,” I say, “I’m not Judas, and you sure as hell ain’t Jesus. You’re too fuckin’ fat. You’d break the cross. So get off my back.”
The other P.O.s laugh as I keep going toward the counter. I turn to see Jack bowing and smiling as though acknowledging my point. I lean over the counter and order a Budweiser and a slice of regular cheesecake.
“Hey you,” says a familiar voice.
I turn and see Ms. Lang looking at me, with a glass of vodka in her hand. A couple of buttons on her blazer are undone and her hair is out of its bun. Her eyes seem a little glassy and she’s even smiling a little. She’s not quite drunk, just a bit more relaxed than usual. Lloyd Bell, looking trim and handsome in a dashiki and jeans, is sitting on a stool between her and me.
“So what’re you doing here?” Ms. Lang asks me.
“Just saying good-bye to Tommy.”
“Oh.” She gets quiet and puts a finger to her lips. From the back of the place Jack Pirone’s voice is saying much too loudly, “So the tribal chief says, ‘We will grant your request and put you to death, but first, a little Boom-ba.”’
“Keep it down, Pirone!” Ms. Lang suddenly shouts. “Show a little respect for Tommy.”
There’s an abrupt silence. She looks more surprised than anybody by her outburst. In two years I’ve never seen her lose her cool this way. I’ve never liked her as much.
“I think I’ll be going to the ladies’ room now,” she says softly, turning around on her stool and getting off.
“All right,” says Lloyd.
“Sure you don’t want to join me?” she asks, running her fingers along Lloyd’s taut, muscular arm.
“My wife would prefer that I don’t,” Lloyd says gently.
“Suit yourself.”
She smiles crookedly and goes teetering off toward the bathroom. Lloyd looks after her, shakes his head, and sighs. Then he takes a long sip of water.
“She’s a good woman,” I say.
“She’s special.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d be interested,” Lloyd says, twisting the watchband on his wrist. “Except I’m married, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“And she’s a little old for me.”
I stop and give Lloyd a good look. He doesn’t seem that much younger to me. He already has wrinkles around his eyes and his neck. The guy behind the counter sets my beer, dessert, and check down in front of me.
I ignore the food for a moment to watch Tommy, Jack, and the rest of the scene around the restaurant. There’s something a little strange and a little sad about a lot of the people from probation, I decide. So many of them started off wanting to do something else with their lives and then got waylaid. I remember how Jack once told me he’d wanted to be a chef years ago. I see Cathy Brody standing near Jack with a drink in her hand and her arm wrapped around her waist. She wanted to be a psychiatrist. And Lloyd Bell, sitting next to me, wanted to be an actor. For a moment I’m glad I didn’t set out to do anything else. There are already too many disappointed people running around.
“So did you see my homeboy Darryl King today?” Lloyd asks me.
“Yeah, I think he’s a psychopath. You want him on your caseload? I’ll trade you him for two chain snatchers and a token sucker to be named later.”
“Not necessary.” Lloyd leans back with his elbows on the counter. “I already got his friend Bobby ‘House’ Kirk as my client. Remember? Anyway, I just heard something I wanted to pass on to you.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you can’t believe everything you hear on the street, but the word is Bobby had something to do with setting a fire at a crack house the other night.”
“Oh yeah?” I rumble with my wallet.
“It had to do with a fellow named Pops Osborn,” Lloyd says calmly, turning around and tapping the counter with his long fingers. “You don’t know if Darryl had anything to do with it, do you?”
“No, but maybe we should put our heads together and see about violating both of these guys. We could call the local precinct …”
“Whoa, boy,” Lloyd says, putting a hand on my shoulder like he’s trying to calm a bucking bronco. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Lloyd stands slowly and turns up his hands. “It’s just word on the street, man. It’s just smoke. Might not even be true. No one reported nobody starting no fire. It’s just people talking. I just thought you might want to know about it.”
“So what am I supposed to do, Lloyd?” I ask.
Lloyd shrugs and checks his hair in the mirror behind the counter. “Ours is not to reason why,” he tells me. “Besides, all this might be bullshit. Your boy Darryl may be a Boy Scout after all. He wouldn’t be the first black youth who got pegged wrong by the system.” He’s smiling uneasily.
I’m about to say something else to him when somebody starts poking me in the back with a sharp finger.
I whirl around and see it’s Tommy Markham. His eyes are moist and he’s licking his lips. “I thoughta somebody,” he’s saying. “I thought about what you asked and I thoughta somebody, y’know.”
“Somebody who you helped?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Tommy closes his eyes and rocks from side to side. “You asked if I ever changed somebody’s life and I thought of a guy.”
“Who?”
“Augusto Ramirez.”
“Augusto Ramirez?” The name sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it. “What did he do?”
“Ah, he was in a mess of trouble. Y’know. I helped him plenty, Steve. I tell you. I got him a job, and a place to live, and I even introduced him to his wife. He’s doing great now. He writes to me all the time.”
“That’s great, Tommy.” I’m still not sure where I heard the name Ramirez before. But Tommy is smiling and his head is bobbing up and down again as he limps to the bathroom. I don’t want to break his mood by questioning him too closely. I pick up my beer and cheesecake and start to walk back to the booth where we’d been sitting.
Along the way, I step directly into Jack Pirone’s path. “Hey, Jack, I got a question. You ever hear of somebody named Augusto Ramirez?”
Jack snorts and smiles cynically. “Of course. What do you want to know about him?”
“Who was he? I asked Tommy to name one guy he’d ever really helped in his career and he said this guy Ramirez. And I can’t think of why I’d heard that name before.”
“That guy was a cop-killer,” Jack says with a sigh. “He was Tommy’s client a few years ago and Tommy got him out of jail and the guy walked up to some cop in the street and blew his fuckin’ head off.” He shrugs. “Fuckin’ Tommy never could keep anything straight.”
15
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT A stumpy woman with a microphone stood at the base of 1 Times Square on Forty-second Street. The headline parade of the day’s news stories revolved on the brightly lit “zipper” sign over her head.
“Brothers and sisters,” she said. “You don’t have to go to hell.”
A tall man wearing a short sequined dress, hi
gh heels, and a blond wig paused to stare at her.
Richard Silver, driving a navy blue Audi across town, was stopped at the nearest red light. He rolled down his window to watch the scene that was unfolding across the street on his left. “Homosexuals,” he said. “Another thing I don’t understand.”
Jessica Riley, sitting beside him in a Tiffany necklace and a short black Galanos dress worth five thousand dollars, said nothing. In the backseat, his son, Leonard, wiped his nose with his shirt sleeve.
“I mean, how could you allow such a thing to be done to you?” Richard Silver said without taking his eyes off the man in the sequined dress. “It’s humiliating, some of the things they do.”
“Well, I don’t think you’d have much choice if you were in prison,” Jessica said pointedly. “You know, some people go to prison when they do bad things, Richard.”
“Thank you for saying that in front of my son,” Richard Silver told her.
Leonard wasn’t listening anyway. He was too busy pressing his nose against the back window, making the pig face for the people in the car behind them. Jessica checked her makeup in the mirror and crossed her skinny legs.
“So did you hear back about the Long Island thing?” she asked.
“I gotta meet the guy on July Fourth,” Richard Silver said. “Can you believe that?”
“Couldn’t you do it another time?”
“They’re gonna have a hemorrhoid in Chicago if we don’t do this soon,” he explained. “They’re already worried.”
“So what’d you tell them?”
“I told them to relax and avoid impure thoughts,” Richard Silver said. “What am I supposed to do?”
The eastward traffic wasn’t budging. He stuck his head out the window and saw tightly packed cars for at least two blocks ahead. On the far corner a crowd of people were gathered in front of the Off-Track Betting outlet. In the rearview mirror Richard Silver saw a movie marquee that said “Desire Me Wet.” A neon ad for a Japanese camera company splashed green light over the street.
“You don’t have to be unclean or live a life in darkness,” the stumpy woman with the microphone shouted. “You don’t have to buy or rent pornography.”
The transvestite, who was standing there listening to her, moved his purse from his right shoulder to his left shoulder.
“Let me ask you something,” Richard Silver said to his son. “You understand that play tonight?”
“Yes,” said Leonard Silver, who had brown bangs, braces, and his father’s eyes. He had just turned thirteen. “I think it was about imperialism.”
“What?” His father winced like he’d been hit on the head by a frying pan.
“Like the Oriental guy who was dressed like a girl, he was like China, you know?” Leonard said in a thin voice that meandered up and down his vocal register. “And the French diplomat, he was like the symbol of Western imperialism, trying to colonize her.”
“Hey, Leonard,” his father said, “all I want to know is how you could sleep with a guy for twenty years and think it was a lady.”
Jessica Riley shook her head dismissively. “Did you like the play, Leonard?” she asked, turning around to look at him in the backseat.
He slumped down a little when she spoke to him. “It was okay, I guess,” he mumbled.
“I thought it was filth,” Richard Silver volunteered.
“Mom said she liked it,” Leonard said tentatively.
“Oh she did, did she?” said his father.
“Yeah.” Leonard made squeaking noises on the windows with the tips of his fingers. “She thought I should see it.”
“I told you she was poisoning him,” Richard said angrily to Jessica.
The light changed once more, and traffic still did not move. Across the street, a car pulled up near the preacher woman and a group of young white men wearing tight T-shirts and hair that was carefully sprayed back and shaved on the sides got out. The transvestite did not notice them. He was too busy looking through his purse like he wanted to give the woman with the microphone some money.
“You don’t have to be depraved,” the stumpy woman cried. “You don’t have to be a drug addict. Or homeless.”
“She’s trying to turn him against me,” Richard Silver told Jessica. “She’ll do anything to hurt me.”
His son banged his knees together in the backseat. “Dad, we’re missing Friday Night Videos.”
“Leonard, what do you want me to do? Get out and push the other cars out of the way?” Richard Silver turned to Jessica and lowered his voice. “You see what I mean? She’s spoiling him too.”
Leonard stared silently out his window. On the other side of Forty-second Street, one of the young white men with sprayed-back hair got a tire iron out of the trunk of his car and approached the preacher woman and the transvestite. His brow was knit and his arms were like sides of beef hanging off his shoulders.
The transvestite saw the young white men coming and began to edge away. “You don’t have to give in to temptation,” the preacher woman said.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Leonard,” his father said as traffic finally began to move. “It’s a free country and you can grow up to be anything you want, but if you turn out to be a homosexual, I swear I’ll cut my own throat and hold your mother personally responsible.”
The transvestite broke into a run with the pack of well-groomed men in pursuit. He clattered across the street on his high heels and almost got hit by Richard Silver’s car as it rolled forward. “Fuckin’ imbecile,” Richard Silver said.
The transvestite made a left at the Travelers Aid bureau and then ran across Broadway. As the light turned red again, he tried to disappear into the three-card monte crowd standing in front of Off-Track Betting, but the man with the tire iron and his friends followed. The crowd quickly parted and then the men with the sprayed hair were all over the transvestite, kicking him and beating him with the tire iron.
As Richard Silver drove by, he saw the transvestite lying in a bloody, burbling heap of sequins on the sidewalk.
“You don’t have to be a sinner,” the stumpy woman’s voice said over a loudspeaker somewhere behind him.
“What a life,” Richard Silver said.
16
HAVING CONVENED WITH THE likes of Darryl King and Tommy Markham earlier in the evening, I am in no mood for brie wheels, corny Motown tapes, and long discussions about interior design. What I need is a slump-breaking drunk and a lively fuck.
Instead, I get belligerently stewed and nearly ruin my ex-girlfriend’s engagement party. I can’t seem to get along with anybody anymore. Most of my old friends are in business now and our lives have nothing to do with each other. They’re all busy moving to the suburbs where they’ll be safe from people like my clients. I get into a stupid argument with the fiancé about coddling criminals and nearly take a swing at him.
I wake up on Saturday afternoon alone in my apartment with my pants off and my shoes still on. My mouth feels sore and I can’t remember how I got home. In my left hand, I’m clutching a miniature Grenadian national flag.
I think I need to make some changes.
I shower, shave, drink two cups of coffee, and swallow three aspirins. Calling to apologize for last night will probably just make things worse, I decide. I put on side two of the Ramones Road to Ruin album and try to get myself reanimated. The phone rings in the middle of the second song.
Maria Sanchez, finally asking if I’ll help her move.
“When?” I ask in a groggy voice.
“Right now,” she says.
A girlfriend from school is going to let her stay with her and her family on Edgecombe Avenue until Maria gets settled. But we have to do it immediately. Her uncle, who’s sexually abused her for all these years, will be home by five. If he finds out what we’re up to, he’ll be good and pissed, and he might not hesitate to use his gun.
I call my old pothead friend Terry Greene and wake him up. After twenty minutes of threatening and cajoling, I
convince Terry to borrow his parents’ Toyota.
By 3:30 Terry, wearing a pair of shades and a “Butthole Surfers” T-shirt, is waiting outside with the car. One thing about Terry: He never went upscale. While my other friends are making their way up the corporate ladder or working out of some back office in Bergen County, Terry is still straggling along as a freelance photographer, specializing in pictures of bar mitzvahs and cockfights. A half-smoked cigarette dangles from his lips as he holds the passenger side door open for me.
“You look like shit,” he says as I get in.
Catching my dark red eyes in the rearview mirror, I have to agree. “Go pretty slow, all right. Otherwise, I’m gonna throw up all over your inside.”
“Y’know you better watch it with that drinking,” Terry says, peering at me over his sunglasses as he eases the car over a beer can and a dead bird on Avenue B.
“Tell me about it,” I say. “The last thing I remember last night I was quoting Lillian Hellman to you about anti-Semitism and professional ice hockey.”
“What’s the matter? Why’d you get so fucked up?”
I stick my head out the window and inhale deeply. “I dunno. I’m kind of having a hard time at work, you know. Just a mild case of the doubts, I guess.”
“I thought you liked it so much,” Terry says, aiming the car uptown. “With the interestingly dysfunctional people and all.”
“You know what I wish sometimes?” I say, lighting a cigarette and blowing a trail of smoke out the window. “I wish I had a really simple job. Like drilling holes for a car’s transmission or something. Just stand there all day with the machine. Then after it’s done, you got a car and it just goes. And then after five years, it breaks down like it’s supposed to, and you get another one.”
“Oh, you don’t know anything about cars,” says Terry. I notice he has a new purple streak going down the back of his hair. “I had a Honda Accord after college and I had it in the shop every other month, and that’s supposed to be like the most reliable car in the world.”
“I thought you drove a Chrysler.”
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