by Adam Ross
“Here’s my license and my business card. You guys like steak?”
They told him to shut his mouth and put his hands on his head.
“I manage Tatou on Rodeo. I’ll have my chef cook you the best steak frites you’ve ever had. On me. And that’s not a bribe.”
“Hands down … now!”
“Okay, it’s a bribe.”
He obeyed, pressing his palms to his head; and then, miraculously, the second cop said his name. Off duty, the guy worked security when the restaurant Kevin managed became an after-hours nightclub. There were some guffaws, relieved cursing, and the three of them chatted for a minute or so. I heard Kevin say something that sounded mildly conspiratorial, and they all laughed. The cops told him to be more careful and left.
He cleaned me up when he got back in the car, brushing as much of the coke as he could back into the baggie. My heart was still racing. As soon as he started driving, Kevin went nuts—screaming, hollering, laughing. I didn’t react.
“How about that, huh?”
Troy mumbled something.
“Man, you missed it. I put the Jedi mind-trick on their ass. Are you up, dude?”
Troy, still half-asleep, told him to shut up.
We came to a stoplight, and Kevin looked me over. There was still a mist of fine white dust on my suit jacket. He smiled and winked once, then squeezed my shoulder warmly.
“You’ve got to give me some credit,” Kevin said. “I saved your ass back there. If I didn’t know those guys and they’d seen you covered in that much snow, no legal-eagle career for you, my friend.”
I punched him square in the mouth, and would’ve rammed my fist down his throat if I could. He let go of the steering wheel and cupped his hands over his lips, and I set the parking brake and got out of the car. Then I reached back in to yank him over the passenger seat by the hair—he wasn’t wearing a seat belt—and out into the street.
And then I lost my mind. I started hitting and kicking him wherever I could: stomach, ears, ribs, shoulders, face. He flipped over onto his stomach, lacing his hands behind his head to protect himself. He was screaming my name as I dragged him by the hair onto the sidewalk, ripped off my tie, and, with my knee pressing against his spine, laced it around his neck and began choking him. I got quiet and methodical and pulled the two ends as hard as I could until Kevin started gagging. I’ll never forget how he tapped my leg, like he was asking for a time-out. But I adjusted my grip and held him taut. He started to fade. It reminded me of when I used to wrestle, when I was pinning someone, and the ref would press his hand under my opponent’s shoulders, reaching deeply beneath the two of us with his head turned away, as if he were feeling for something under a sofa; and there’d be that extra beat before he hit the mat—like that one extra beat between hurting someone and ending them—when everything was completely still.
Next thing I knew, Troy was all over me. He’d yanked my jacket over my shoulders and head, and in that darkness I felt the blows in my gut and ribs and face like a train running over me. When the same squad car from before showed up, my shirt was covered in blood, and the officers, again wielding their guns, put Troy on the ground and cuffed all three of us. After they got the story straight, I told them I wasn’t going to press charges against Troy, who they’d put in the back of the cruiser—though by then it was too late. They’d found his stash (two ounces of pot, ten grams of mushrooms, a gram of coke) and were taking him in to be booked.
I got a cab home. The last I saw of Kevin that night, one of the officers was tending to the burns around his neck. The shame and remorse washing over me was so intense that I wanted to rush up to my brother and kneel at his feet, to beg his forgiveness and lay prostrate before him until he picked me up with his own hands.
But I did nothing. I said nothing. We just looked at each other once, the moment before I got into the cab.
He was lucky. He cut a deal with the DA, selling out his dealer in exchange for two years’ probation. With my parents’ support he entered rehab at a facility in Florida, where he stayed for six months and got clean. They had to keep me updated on his progress, because after that night he and I didn’t speak for two years.
But the night Kevin called me for help, the moment my father predicted would come, it was with bad news about his financée, Ruth Ann. We’d been speaking with greater frequency in the year since my parents’ death, though we didn’t see each other as much as I would’ve liked. I work for Davis Polk, in mergers and acquisitions; they pay me well enough, and in return own the freshest hours of my life and then some. It was close to midnight but I was still at the office and completely buried in a deal. I’d be there till morning.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked.
“Of course,” I lied.
He told me that Ruth Ann had left him. He’d come home from work late the night before to find all of her stuff gone—furniture, clothes, even the engagement ring. She’d left a note, and when he tracked her down this morning she admitted that she’d been seeing another man for some time.
“He’s some bigwig entertainment lawyer,” he said. “She told me that she wants to have a family, get married, and have kids, and that she didn’t think I could provide all that.” He began to weep.
None of this surprised me. I’d always considered Ruth Ann a killer—as traditional as she was iron-willed—and wished I’d warned Kevin long ago. Despite her big-city veneer and brash, tough-girl chic, she’s a Georgia girl—a former model—who’s Southern to the core. I could tell she was holding a rip cord—I could practically see it dangling from her fist—that she was ready to pull at any moment in order to land herself with three kids on an estate in Connecticut or a duplex on Park. She was an opportunist, and Kevin would be the guy who preceded all that. She’d tell her daughter about her crazy times working in restaurants and clubs, her oat-sowing days, and the wild boyfriend she lived with (“he had tattoos”), talking about all this as if it were her Manifest Destiny to have finally found Daddy. I had dates with women like this constantly. None of them seemed to believe in love; they considered their mothers’ hard-won independence a birthright, bitterly enduring it themselves like they were doing hard time. I could see them sizing me up, trying to foresee the give-and-take, the trade-offs, the long-term returns on their investment in me, as if romance were some mutual fund. Partners at my firm married them with the thoughtlessness of Unification Church members, wives who looked over my shoulder at office functions within seconds of conversation. They have the asses of twenty-year-olds and give birth to supremely gifted kids. They spend Fourth of July through Labor Day in the Hamptons and the school year, so far as I can tell from their spouses, convening after yoga or Pilates to air their grievances about their hectic schedules. “That was my wife,” Trace Motley told me after he snapped his cell phone shut, “and she’s very stressed out.” It was 7:00 a.m. and we’d been working on a merger for twenty-four hours straight. “Twice a week she’s helping organize Dalton’s silent auction and it’s just fucking killing her.” I once had a date with a friend of an old girlfriend of mine; she’d married an exceptionally talented staff writer at a big magazine, whose stuff I read religiously. “She wants another kid,” my date said, “but this guy was supposed to write the Great American Novel, and he didn’t. So now she’s stuck.” There’s a place in hell for these people.
“I don’t know if I can be alone,” Kevin said.
“Where are you?”
“At the restaurant.”
I knew what was coming, so I closed my eyes to steel myself.
“Can you meet me?”
“Of course,” I said.
My eyes were still closed when I hung up. I trudged down to the office of the senior partner I was working with, Charles Hohenwald, and explained that I had a family emergency. “Chucky” berated me for five minutes, reiterating that this was exactly why my evaluation was so critical, that I wasn’t enough of a team player, until at last he said, “Sure, go ahead. Just be
back by two a.m. Keep your cell on, though, and take your BlackBerry too.” I thanked him for his understanding, gave him the finger through the wall the moment I stepped into the hall, and took one of the firm’s cars to the restaurant.
This place Kevin manages, ’57 Chevy, is like the ur-eighties bar, serving up bad nostalgia for the new millennium. A Texan owns it, “an oil guy,” Kevin said, and it’s sprawling. You walk into a main room the size and shape of a basketball court and every bit as loud, at the center of which is a circular bar. The front ends of four Chevys hang from the ceiling like a metallic teepee, their headlights shining on the patrons below, the just graduated, I like to call them: thick-necked former frat boys out for a fuck or a fight or both. The place serves god-awful Tex-Mex I tried only once, quesadillas stuffed with five cheeses and processed chicken, fajitas made with skirt steak—the shittiest of shitty cuts—that Hispanic waiters bring smoking from the kitchen on iron skillets with all the fanfare of inauthentic cuisine. A mariachi band assaults these morons with songs that always seem to start in medias res. But my favorite is the Shooter Girl, who wears crisscrossing black leather bandoliers over her bare shoulders with shot glasses in place of ammunition, a tequila bottle and lime juice at the ready in her holsters; she’s as scantily clad as a stripper, and appreciative drunks stuff dollar bills under the straps. An exposed second level runs along three sides of the main room, and there’s a downstairs banquet area for private parties that’s as enormous as this one. Both were filled—Tuesday night and the place was jammed—and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was always this busy during the week.
“No,” Kevin answered when I asked him. “Tonight’s some weird exception. The owner, he’s just taking a loss. He’s got another one down in Austin that loses as much money as you can in Texas. It’s a write-off. But that’s how he wants it.” He leaned closer and whispered, “He practically ordered us to make the cash disappear.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
Kevin looked at me pitifully. “For example, we let the bartenders take their buybacks.”
“What’s that?”
“Domestic beer here costs five bucks. Customer comes up to the bartender, says, ‘Four Buds, please.’ Bartender says, ‘That’ll be twenty bucks.’ He rings fifteen dollars on the register, drops a paper clip in the drawer for the five-spot he’s just bought back, counts his paper clips at the end of the evening, and now he can afford rent in Manhattan.”
“Ah.”
“Meaning we close our eyes when the busboys steal a case or two of Pacifico.”
“So it’s nickel-and-dime stuff.”
“Meaning, like, once a week, the head manager hands me an envelope with two grand in it and says, ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
I shook my head sadly. “Who’s fudging the books for you?”
“Nobody.”
“Won’t it show up?”
“No. We’ve got this thing we do we call ‘the fold.’ Maybe once every other Friday or Saturday, about two-thirds through service, we turn off the server downstairs. It’s got a glitch we found by accident. It runs maybe an hour behind back-up data, so when we shut it down that time just—poof!—disappears. We pull the register trays at closing, skim the difference, and that’s that.”
I took a sip of my beer. “Don’t do that, Kevin.”
“You mean don’t look a gift horse in the mouth? Fuck that. Plus if I say no, what am I, a squealer? They’d fire me in a second.”
“It’s still not good.”
“That’s the least of my worries right now.”
He did look like hell, his eyes red and puffy from crying off and on, and he had two days’ growth of beard. We’d already been talking about Ruth Ann for a while, and to get his mind off her, I’d changed the subject. He was wearing a double-breasted, eggplant-colored suit that hadn’t been pressed, that he must’ve worn the night before, that reeked of the grease-haze that had hung on him his whole life, but especially here.
“You know the thing about Ruth Ann?” he said.
“No.”
“Well, her feelings always come in twos. She’ll tell you she’s happy about something, over and over again. Totally supportive. When I got this job that’s all she said: ‘I’m so happy, Kevin, it’s such an opportunity for you.’ But at the same time she felt something else. It always came out sooner or later and erased everything else that came before. After a couple glasses of wine she’d be like, ‘You’re better than that place. I thought that the minute I walked in there. I took one look and thought: What’s Kevin doing here?’ And I’d go, ‘That’s not what you said.’ And she’d say, ‘Are you surprised?’ So, fuck me. ‘Of course I’m surprised.’ And then she’d be like, ‘This is why I don’t tell you anything.’ ”
Kevin was better than this place, I agreed. I would’ve liked to see him running an establishment that was far more upscale, with fine service, a different clientele, and real cuisine. A restaurant that taught him that better things were possible. Where he didn’t close an eye to buybacks or skim money. He’d had that at the Mesa Grill but got fired for talking to customers about investing in his own venture. A place like ’57 Chevy must make you hopeless, and that’s something I didn’t want him to be.
“Forget her,” I said. “Think about it. What if you were married? What if you’d had kids and she’d done a one-eighty on you then?”
He shrugged.
I don’t think he’d heard a single word. “Can I tell you something about her? Something you don’t know.”
He looked at me.
“Do you remember when you guys were moving a few months ago, and you stayed at my apartment? You know what she told me?”
“What?”
“She said she was going to raise your family in Georgia. She had it all mapped out. You’d manage the country club where her father’s a board member. She ever tell you that?”
“No.”
What more could I say? For instance, about what I really thought of her? That same night, after he left to go to work, Ruth Ann and I drank and talked for a long time. I finally set up the fold-out couch in front of a high window that faced Jersey City—that fallen-over-Christmas-tree view—and she was dressed for bed, her gown as sheer as a cobweb. When I said good night, she put her arms around me. “Why can’t Kevin be ambitious like you?” she asked. “If Kevin had all this”—she indicated the river and park in between, as if I owned the whole of Gotham—“we’d be happy.” Then she kissed me, full on the mouth. Ruth Ann’s no lightweight beauty, and it took everything I had to walk to my room, close my door, and, after what seemed like a lifetime, gently press the lock. At breakfast the next morning I looked for signs of discomfort, for a shred of guilt, but we had coffee together like nothing had ever happened. She even invited me to run with her in the park. Of course I’d never tell Kevin about this, since it could only doom me.
Then my phone rang, the office number showing on the screen. I stepped away and pressed my ear to the receiver, stopping my other ear with my palm.
It was Kelly Winslow, an attorney I was working with on the merger. “Everything all right?” she asked.
“Getting there,” I told her.
“Good. You know how Chucky said to be back by two?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t be late,” she said.
“Gotcha.”
“You’re America’s Most Wanted, Caleb.”
When I came back, Kevin asked, “Work?”
I nodded.
He looked at his watch.
“You guys must be billing like mad.”
“I’m not billing right now.”
Kevin smiled broadly. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”
“Hey, I’m here, not there. I ain’t billing.”
“Come on. I’ll bet if you, like, took a break from a case to, you know, take a nice long shit, followed by a round of golf, the client pays.”
“Negative.”
“You’re kill
ing me.”
“Maybe other people. Maybe at other firms. Not me.”
“Because you’re so upstanding?”
“Because them’s the rules.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never once fudged.”
I looked him in the eye. “Never.”
“Come on,” he said.
Of course I had. But if I were even the slightest bit corrupt, everything about me was corrupt. When it came to Kevin’s assessment of my character, there were no nuances. I’d be Troy’s version again; I refused to concede my advantage.
“The stakes are too high,” I insisted.
Kevin clucked his tongue. “Look,” he said, “give me a hand with something.”
He got up and led me across the crowded floor. As we went toward the kitchen, a black busboy in a skull-and-crossbones do-rag crashed into me with a tub of dirty dishes. “Watch where you’re going, white boy,” he said, and continued plowing through the crowd. We entered the kitchen through swinging double doors. There were five cooks still working the line.
Kevin said, “Hola, Enrique!”
“Hola, boss!”
“Es mi hermano,” he said, pointing at me.
“Hermano!” the cooks repeated, then did the same thing that every worker in every kitchen my brother has ever managed has always done the moment I turned my back: they all laughed.
He led me down some slippery metal stairs, as narrow and steep as a fire escape ladder, then through a winding hallway lit by the occasional single bulb. It was like a mine shaft. Here we ran into another black guy, dressed in a suit, his jacket big as a cape, and sporting a flattop; he must have been close to seven feet tall. Kevin introduced him as Traylor.
“Are you bringing down the register trays?” Kevin asked.
“Five minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
We kept walking.
“Lurch back there?” he whispered a second later. “Top power forward at Georgia Tech. Gonna go, like, first round his sophomore year. Two games into the NCAA tournament he pulls down a routine rebound, lands funky, and blows out both ACLs. Now he’s an assistant manager in the food service industry.”
