On the Ropes addm-1

by Tom Schreck

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Claudia,” I said.

  “LT is going to be the board representative on our Quality Assurance Ad Hoc Committee. The committee will oversee things like record-keeping and risk management. After we have our emergency meeting, we’ll invite you in for the first of what will be bi-monthly meetings.”

  Now her talking to me made sense. It was another opportunity to stick the whole paperwork thing to me, only this time, with the added strength of throwing in a board member. It was just an extra special treat that Espidera was going to be involved.

  Recently, Espidera donated an old piece of property that at one time had been an old hotel. It was in disrepair and way out in the middle of nowhere, and several agencies had gotten together to convert it into a women’s shelter. The plan was to make the old hotel a halfway house for addicted women and their children. I was convinced that Espidera donated it for the tax break. Also, because of its location, it had no marketable value.

  Next in was Dr. Gabbibb. I was figuring he was going to come right over and chew me out with a series of DAT, DAT, DATs, but he surprised me.

  “Good morning, Doofy,” he flashed me a big toothy smile. He had on a Jason Giambi jersey today. “Notar feeleends I hepe?” He extended his hand.

  This was pretty bizarre for the most arrogant man I ever met.

  “Sure, Doc,” I said.

  “Doofy-you dar dinto du Yankees, no?”

  “What’s that, Doc?” I asked.

  “DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, shit… excuse me,” he yelled.

  “Oh yeah-sure, I love the Yanks.”

  “Ere’s two teeckits I can’t use,” he said.

  I loved the Yanks and the tickets were for the September 11 game against the Mariners, right behind the dugout, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t know what his motive was, and I didn’t want to be indebted to him.

  “I can’t, Doc, I’m going to be away then,” I said.

  “DAT, DAT… shit,” he said. He couldn’t have been too upset because he only let out two DATs.

  Finally, he turned his attention to Claudia, who was anxious to talk about her committee. Claudia kept on about how the new committee was going to ensure that our paperwork was always in compliance. It was crystal clear that she was trying to get a reaction from me in front of the board members. Before I could respond to Claudia’s bait about the new committee, I heard Hymie’s entrance.

  “Where’s that goy friend of mine?” Hymie said. “The one who should be wearing the Star of David on his trunks, he’s a Jew in harp’s clothing!”

  “Hymie!” I got up to greet my buddy. “Shalom aleichem! My friend,” I said.

  “You hear this schmeckel?” he said. “He’s not foolin’ me-he’s not a Jew-but I love ’im.” He pinched my cheek.

  I smiled and looked down at the four gray hairs and multiple liver spots that made up his scalp. He was about five foot six, with glasses and two Miracle-Ears turned up to maximum. He had on his tan Sansabelts and white shoes.

  “Hey Hymie-shalom,” LT said.

  “Oh, hello, Lawrence,” Hymie said.

  He also turned and greeted Claudia, and soon after that they went in the boardroom to talk privately about Walanda’s death and to wait on the rest of the board. They’d probably also talk about my written warning. Hymie wouldn’t be pleased, but he wouldn’t stand in the way of what had to be done because he knew that type of influence wasn’t right. I understood that, and I wouldn’t ask him for anything different.

  After the board met privately for about forty-five minutes, they called Monique and me into the boardroom to introduce us to the quality assurance process. Besides Claudia, Hymie, and Espidera, the committee was made up of Mrs. Sheila Silver, a board member and retired social worker; Rhonda Bowerman, the executive director of the Eagle Heights Jewish Unified Services, which was about forty-five miles away; and Gabbibb.

  Sheila Silver was a goof. She had an MSW degree and passed her certification, so she was a certified social worker, but as far as I could tell, she had never worked a day in her life. She was in her early fifties, with jet-black hair, overplucked eyebrows, and every possible type of plastic surgery you could imagine. She weighed about 115 pounds and talked incessantly about losing weight, dieting, and exercise, though she always had an injury of some sort that kept her from actually doing much other than hiring a personal trainer. She was always coming from or going to her therapist, her hairdresser, her ob/gyn, or the manicurist.

  Sheila was married to an ophthalmologist who was the first guy in Crawford to do laser surgery. They were set financially, but you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with Sheila. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t mean, she was just incredibly self-absorbed. The type of person that never wanted to offend you, not because she didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but rather because she didn’t want anything to bother her conscience. Sheila knew social work theory and kept abreast of current events, but she had never actually gotten her hands dirty working with real people.

  Bowerman did the same job as Claudia at our sister agency. The Eagle Heights clinic operated in much the same way as ours with the exception that many of their clients came from more rural areas. Eagle Heights is a couple of towns away from Kingsville, where the new halfway house was going to be, and is about a forty-five minute drive from Crawford. There are dairy farms and cornfields, but there’s also some of that unwashed small-town feel to the area. Lots of broken-down cars and large, rusted appliances in big backyards that lead out to sections of woods where kids go to drink, get high, and feel each other up. Many of these people lived on public assistance just like the clientele at the Crawford clinic, and they had a lot of the same issues. The difference was that somehow they had an attitude that they were above people who lived in the ghettos. I could never figure out if it was a notion of racial superiority or the fact that their forefathers, however scummy they were, lived on the same land for generations. Just the same, between our two clinics you could cast the Jerry Springer show and still have enough characters for half a year of Montel.

  Bringing Bowerman in was supposed to give the committee an element of an impartial, unbiased view. I highly doubted that had any chance of occurring because Claudia wouldn’t risk it. Bowerman and Claudia were acquaintances, if not friends, and they were both part of that sorority of angry, unattractive female social workers. Bowerman was a tall, mean-looking woman who resembled Katherine Harris, that scary-looking woman who was counting or not counting, I forget which, Al Gore’s hanging chads. Bowerman looked like Harris’s less attractive older sister with frizzy dishwater-brown hair, cut in a misshapen bob. I didn’t know her well and only met her a couple of times, but it was enough to draw the conclusion that I didn’t like her.

  I was the last one to make it into the conference room for the meeting. Monique sat with a chair between her and Espidera. Monique, without saying anything, could show more disdain for a person than most people could by spitting. The thing was, Monique never did anything to put herself in a compromised position. I also believe spending her life as a member of three minority groups gave her the capacity to read people and to some extent know how to protect herself. Some people in the same position get aggressive, some get subservient, but Monique got quiet and thoughtful. She exuded confidence, and at five feet four inches and no more than 130 pounds, she gave off an air of being, if necessary, very dangerous.

  The only chair left meant I got to sit next to my best friend, LT.

  “Hey Duff,” he said. “What’s happening?” He threw a few shadow boxing combinations, trying to impress me. They were poorly thrown.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Claudia was getting the meeting started. “Thank you for coming. The purpose of this committee is for us, as an agency, to examine where we are at risk in regard to regulatory standards.”

  She was at the head of the table and fortunately, I was four seats away from her, which meant I could doodle and have it look like I was taking note
s.

  Claudia cleared her throat.

  “The New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse clearly states…”

  I figured she was good for twenty minutes before anyone else got a chance to speak. If I could occasionally look up, make eye contact, and nod, she wouldn’t have any idea what I was thinking about or writing down. During these types of meetings, I usually take the time to write my all-time list of boxing’s best pound-for-pound fighters. By the way, Willie Pep gets my number one spot and Ali isn’t even in the top five. I’ve also tried to relive every sexual episode I’ve ever had, but that never got me through more than a few minutes. Sometimes, I simply resorted to my Salvador Dali-type pencil drawings. Hippopotamuses were my favorite.

  Claudia was going strong.

  “… The essential feature of the new regulations is the importance of the quarterly treatment plan updates, which must be signed by the client, the primary counselor, and the supervisor on or before the seventh visit for those in nonintensive programs, the third visit for those in intensive programs, and on the second visit for those in day treatment…”

  That was as interesting as it got. I was on to my fifth hippo and I just couldn’t get the ears the way I liked them. The trick was to make the ears ridiculously tiny against the round fat of the hippo’s body. The perfectionism of my art often tortured me.

  I looked up to give one of my nods to show that I was paying attention and Claudia was in mid-sentence.

  “… which is the biggest challenge we face here and now. It is what will define our agency and ultimately lead to our success or failure. Duffy, can you give our board members and Rhonda three examples of how we’ve already begun to address this issue?”

  “Uh… of course, Claudia. Uh… before I do that though, I would like to point out that we, as an agency, uh, excel in the face of challenge, and to quote Vince Lombardi, ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.’”

  “Thank you, Duffy.” She glared at me. “But please give us three examples.” She knew I wasn’t paying attention and now she wanted to embarrass me.

  “Yes, uh, well first and foremost, it is something that both Monique and I have incorporated into our daily work here. It’s something that she thought of, and I don’t feel right taking the credit for it. Monique, go ahead.”

  She didn’t blink, God bless her.

  “Thanks, Duffy, but you’re being modest. The three things we’ve incorporated that exemplify what Claudia is speaking of are one: peer review of all records; two: monthly self-audits of treatment plans; and three: corrective action within forty-eight hours when outliers occur. It has made a big difference.”

  “It sure has!” I chimed in.

  Claudia barely hid her rage, but she didn’t want to lose her cool in front of the outsiders. Monique saved my ass perfectly. The list of people I owed favors to was getting longer.

  Mercifully, the meeting only went on for another half an hour. I never did get the hippo like I wanted, but the important thing with art is progress. After the meeting, I made sure I finished the death reporting form and put it in the Michelin Woman’s mailbox. The rest of the day I spent catching up on records because I didn’t have any sessions scheduled, which I was grateful for. Walanda’s murder had me feeling less than therapeutic.

  I spent the early evening at the gym listening to Smitty tell me how I threw the hook like a bitch. He drilled me on the footwork to stay away from Suggs’s power. The plan was for me to jab him and keep moving to my right so he couldn’t reach me with his right hand. The problem with that was he could also throw a wicked left hook and I’d be moving directly into that.

  The thing with fight strategies was that they always looked good on paper, but when you’re standing in front of someone set on taking your head off, it didn’t always seem as easy. Smitty’s strategy was the right one, though, and I planned on following it as closely as I could.

  After the workout, we sat in Smitty’s office and watched tape of the guy on Smitty’s old TV console. Suggs was a huge and ripped white guy with a shaved head and a Fu Manchu beard. There was no doubt this guy could fight. The guys who fight in the South and Midwest circuit fight shitty competition, but it doesn’t mean they all suck. Suggs was knocking everyone out and doing it quickly. Sure, a lot of them were tomato cans, but he was making them unconscious. My movement was going to be the key.

  I finished up at the gym and headed home. Once again, Al gave me his customary greeting at the door, but this time I was ready. I intercepted his paws and moved gracefully to my left, deflecting his testicle-seeking charge. Already, I was emphasizing movement.

  It had been a productive day for Al. In between couch gnawing sessions, he busied himself by making a mess with every single newspaper and periodical he could find in the Blue. He got halfway through the second cushion on my couch. I now had one half of a cushion to sit and unwind on at the end of the day. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining it or not, but Al’s early-morning activity that made its way between my toes seemed to linger in the air like some evil potpourri that you’d find in a very special ring of hell.

  I didn’t feel at all like straightening the place up or, for that matter, deodorizing it, so I headed to AJ’s. I was hoping to find Kelley to see what he could tell me about Walanda and jail. I took Al with me in an attempt to minimize the damage to my home. For whatever reason, he seemed to be easier on the Eldorado, that is, if you consider barf in velour easier. Come to think of it, the barf from his last ride had formed somewhat crunchy concentric circles on the passenger seat. Perhaps I could find some mystic palm reader to tell me what the circles could tell me about my future. Suffice it to say, the Eldorado was no longer what I’d describe as “daisy fresh.”

  I left Al sleeping on the front seat with his head on the center armrest. I slid the eight-tracks under the seats so he’d be less tempted and headed into the bar. The Fearsome Foursome were all in their places and so was Kelley, in his usual slot, one seat removed. The Foursome were already deep into it.

  “The guy who played Sergeant Schultz was a Nazi in real life,” Rocco said. “I saw it on the E! True Hollywood Story.”

  “I never heard that. I know that the Hogan guy got killed by Colonel Klink after he filmed the two of them having gay sex,” said TC.

  “That’s not true, is it?” Jerry Number Two seemed genuinely disturbed by the revelation.

  “No, it’s not true,” said Jerry Number One. “It was the French guy he was having sex with. His name was Pepe Le Pew.”

  AJ had the Yanks on TV with the sound down and a radio going. The Foursome were about to move on to their next topic when AJ shushed them.

  “Fellas,” AJ said. “It’s the bottom of the fifth.”

  The talking ceased and AJ turned up the radio as everyone set their eyes on the TV. John Sterling had the call.

  “Well, here it is. The end of five and you know what that means. It’s time to flush out the Clogger-and here he is, right on time, the pride of the real Windy City, Crawford, New York… Clogger McGraw!”

  The Yankee Stadium crowd was on its feet like it always was waiting for the Clog to do his thing. Sterling waited, giving the Clogster an exaggerated pause, and then did it.

  “… aaaaaand Clogger cannnnnns it!”

  The bar roared right along with the crowd at the stadium. It was great to see a local guy make good.

  I took the seat next to Kelley, and AJ opened a Schlitz for me. I asked him to back everybody up. The Yanks were beating Tampa Bay eleven to nothing and it wasn’t much of a game, so I figured Kelley was approachable. At least he was as approachable as he got.

  “What’s up, Kel?” I said.

  “Hey Duff,” he said. “Thanks for the drink.”

  That was pretty talkative for Kelley. I decided to take a chance.

  “You mind if I pick your brain about Walanda?”

  “Go ahead, Duff, but I got to tell you, I don’t know a whole hell of a lot.”


  “Did anything ever come of the Webster stuff she mentioned?”

  “Not that I heard of. Walanda has said a lot of shit to the both of us over the years,” he took a sip of his Coors Light. “I wouldn’t put a lot into it, Duff. Who knows what she meant.”

  “How’s the investigation going on her murder?” I asked.

  “Duff, I’m a beat cop,” he put his bottle on the bar with some force. “I don’t decide what the department does. They’ll send someone over and ask some questions. The COs will keep their eyes open, and it might eventually come out who did it. But to be honest, it isn’t a big deal at the station.”

  “Does that feel right to you?” I said. It came out more confrontational than I wanted it to.

  “Duff, this is all day, every day for me,” he turned to look at me. “The answer is no, it doesn’t feel right, but keep it in perspective. Walanda has no family to speak of looking for answers. She didn’t have a lot going on that was positive, and-let’s be honest-the society as whole probably won’t miss her. I don’t like the way that sounds, but it’s true.”

  Kelley was, of course, right. He wasn’t being a jerk about it; he was being pragmatic in the reality he has to deal with every day of his life.

  “Did anything about her stepdaughter turn up?” I asked.

  “Not that I heard of but, Duff, that girl could have gone thirty different places and still be with family,” he said.

  “Would you think I was crazy if I looked into this whole deal a little bit?”

  “Looked into?”

  “You know,” I said. “Tried to get some answers.”

  Kel shot me a look that was part disbelief, part disdain.

  “What are you, fuckin’ ‘Duffy for Hire, Private Eye’ all of a sudden?”

  “No-nothing like that. I just want to look into it a little bit.”

  “Look, Duff, I know you’re a tough guy,” he said. “I know you can take a punch, but you don’t know anything about being a cop.”