“I used to be a doper, Artie. I’m recovering. I just wanted to tell you.”
“Really? What kind of dope?”
“Pills. I woke up one morning about dusk and found myself with a tattoo on my hip, but I had no idea where I got it. I went straight into treatment. I’ve been sober for three years.”
Gee, I didn’t have a tattoo or an ex-drug problem or anything interesting. I did have a dog.
We sat side by side on the bed, shyly, silently, fully clothed. Jellyroll peered at us from the floor, making Crystal edgy, I thought, so I told him to go get in his place. He gave me the stink eye, but he curled into his Adirondack Spruce Bough Dog Bed. (He has two.)
“Uh, could I see your tattoo?”
Crystal and I were breathing audibly as she stepped out of her yellow dress. Maybe we both had been alone too long. She wore black lingerie, a tiny lace bra, and silk tap pants. The stocking tops clung to her thighs of their own accord. She turned sideways and elevated her left hip—and there it was, in full color. She had said it was a parrot; it looked to me like a macaw, but this was no time for ornithology. I knelt for a closer look. Rolling her stockings slowly down her legs filled me with inexpressible delight. I kissed the bird. She released the clasp of her bra and shed it with a shrug. I stood up. She clasped her breasts in both hands and said, “No fair, you’re still dressed.”
That made my heart go pitter-pat. With trembling hands, I removed my Italian ensemble, and for a moment I stood naked before her. From the living room, Johnny Hartman was singing, and that voice ran right through me like a sexual shudder. She sat on the bed, slipped out of her tap pants, but they remained hooked on her left foot as we made love…
Simultaneous orgasms can change the world, at least on an individual level. Still, the world could change two orgasms at a time, and it would be a better place for all concerned. Love can turn cynics into sonneteers.
FOUR
“LOOK HOW SAD,” said crystal before I knew she was awake.
“Huh? Who?”
She leaned up on one elbow. “Jellyroll. Is he sick?”
“No, he’s theatrical.” When he’s ready to go, he sits peering at me with forlorn eyes, ears adroop, betrayed loyalty itself. The bed is low, so in the mornings he sits breathing on me—dog breath smells vaguely of fish. This morning he was doing his number on Crystal. I rolled over and kissed her. Her body felt sweet. Life felt sweet. Maybe this relationship had legs.
She hugged and kissed Jellyroll. He looked across Crystal at me as if to say, “Watch, now she’s going to ask you what I want.”
“What does he want? Breakfast?”
“He wants to go to the park.”
“Park” was one of the first words in what has grown over the years into a huge vocabulary. At the sound of it, he began to wag his tail and whine. Pretty soon he’d begin to puff out his cheeks with suppressed barking sounds. His lips would flap soon, and he’d begin to make long, sustained moaning sounds. Dogs are ego cases. I could have lain there naked with Crystal for a decade or two.
“Let’s take him out,” she said.
“You mean you want to go with us?”
“Sure. We’re going, Jellyroll.”
“No barking,” I reminded him. He has several barks, depending on the matter at hand, but the hot-damn-we’re-all-going-to-the-park is the worst, high-pitched, brain piercing. I discourage it. But I shared his joy that Crystal was going with us. While we watched, she got up and put last night’s clothes on, minus the stockings.
“Does this look ridiculous for the park?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Sure it does,” she said, checking herself in the mirror. “I can’t go to the park in a dress at nine a.m.”
“I see what you mean.” I considered the problem. The next step in our romantic development would occur when Crystal began to leave clothes in my closet. I longed for the day when I’d see her cue case leaning against the closet door. That would bespeak commitment.
“You have to put on your clothes from last night. It’ll look like we’re going to brunch, or something.”
“Okay. Do you want to go to brunch?”
“No, I hate brunch.”
It was another hot day, and by noon, when the bricks and concrete heated up like a tandoori oven, the city would slow to a lethargic, dispirited pace. But now, before the day’s assault by 800,000 automobiles, the air was still cool and thin enough to breathe. I felt wonderful strolling arm in arm with Crystal. On the way to brunch.
Jellyroll and his collie friend Barney played tug of war with a stick while a half dozen other dogs frolicked and gamboled and milled about sniffing. Atavistic juices flowing, Jellyroll and Barney snarled and growled as they dug in and yanked at the stick as if it were a caribou tibia.
Groggy looks on their faces, the human contingent stood around watching their dogs’ delight. The contrast was striking. Dogs have been blessed with life in the moment, humans cursed with expectancy. The humans expected to go to work, most by subway. I know how the other dog walkers talk about Jellyroll in the light of their own tedious employment.
“Hell, Freddie’s as cute as Jellyroll.”
“Sure he is, so’s Sascha.”
“So how come Jellyroll’s pulling down the big bucks, while I’m working for a living?”
“Aw, it’d be a drag. You got to be real pushy. You got to be a stage mother. Mama Rose for your dog.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d rather stay with the firm.”
“Yeah.”
The dog walkers looked Crystal up and down covertly. I introduced her to the Chinese lady who owned Barney, to Phil and Les, the gay couple who jointly owned two overweight golden retrievers, and to Amy and Phyllis, actresses with their first dog, an ex-stray they’d named Uta. And I introduced Crystal to Seth. Even Seth’s dog, an overweight lhasa apso, seemed bitter. Seth grinned at Crystal in a way he probably thought was sexy.
“You’re all dressed up,” noted Seth.
“Brunch,” I said.
“On Wednesday?”
There were other dog walkers with whom I had nodding acquaintance, but they didn’t seem to want to be introduced. I didn’t know their names anyway, only their dogs’ names.
“Did you hear?” Seth asked.
“No, what?”
“Somebody took a shot at me yesterday afternoon.”
“No!”
“Look at this.” He led Crystal and me to a nearby English plane tree, and a few dog walkers followed. Their faces were grim. Seth pointed at the tree trunk.
A thumb-sized hole went deep into the heart of the tree. I seemed to be the only dog walker who hadn’t heard. The others, standing around the tree, nodded gravely at the hole. One of the goldens peed on the tree trunk.
“When I moved here, the last thing my father said to me was, ‘Don’t get hit by any stray bullets,’ ” Phil remarked.
“You?” said Seth. “It was me they shot at.”
“Stray bullets aren’t shot at anyone,” Phil countered. “That’s what makes them stray.”
“Yeah, but what if it wasn’t a stray bullet?” said Seth gravely. Then he looked from face to face around the tree, cuing each of us to ask, “What do you mean, Seth?”
No one did.
“What do I mean?” said Seth. “I mean there’s a lot of people who would like to see me dead. Producers, directors, hell, costume designers, for that matter, Equity. This was an assassination attempt, pure and simple.” Seth would rather have been assassinated than ignored.
“Did you call the cops?” Crystal asked.
“Sure. You know what they said? They said, ‘Probably just a stray bullet.’ They don’t want to entertain any conspiracy theories. Just call it a stray bullet, that way you can forget it. Another stray bullet.”
“Where was it fired from?” I asked.
Seth pointed to the wall that separated us from the northbound lanes of the West Side Highway, cars whizzing past, any num
ber of them driven by crazies toting automatic weapons.
A tall, gawky stranger approached. He carried a guitar case festooned with travel stickers from places like Busch Gardens and the Kennedy Space Center. Exuberant Barney ran in front of the stranger. He had to stop abruptly. “Hey,” he snarled, “those goddamned dogs are supposed to be leashed!”
“Don’t take it out on dogs just because you got no talent,” said Seth.
“It was probably him,” said Phyllis after the stranger had moved on. “He probably hates dog owners because he stepped in dog shit once when he was a child. Now he goes around the city parks killing dog owners. There’s probably been dozens killed, only the cops never made the dog-shit connection, so it doesn’t get reported for what it is: another dog-walker killing.”
“Now, don’t get yourself all upset, Phyllis,” said Amy. “You don’t have any proof of that. Without proof, it’s paranoia. Besides, it was probably just one of Seth’s ex-collaborators come back for revenge.”
“Yeah,” said Seth gravely.
The dogs continued to frolic, but we took little pleasure in it now. No dog has ever discharged firearms in a densely populated urban area.
I put my arm around Crystal’s shoulder to shield her from mass murderers and New Jersey drivers as we re-crossed Riverside Drive. Commuter traffic had clotted, and the drivers honked at each other mindlessly. The car commuters always seem surprised and thus outraged to find traffic in New York City at rush hour. Day after day, the same inevitability seems to befuddle them and turn them dangerous: “Why can’t we go sixty miles an hour up West End Avenue, goddamnit?”
Crystal said, “I have to go.”
“Go?”
“I’m running a tournament for my uncle at the Golden Hours. The Golden Hours is the reason I don’t have to have a part-time job. Look, how about coming with me?”
“Sure. But I don’t play in tournaments.”
“No? How come?”
“Too challenging.”
“Nerves? After a while you get over that. Would you bring Jellyroll?”
“Jellyroll, you want to go to Brooklyn?”
He wants to go anywhere.
“I told my uncle I was going out with the guy who owns the R-r-ruff Dog. He loves the R-r-ruff Dog.”
Deeper and deeper into Brooklyn we drove, and with each mile my nerves tightened further. Out of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, Crystal picked up the Gowanus Expressway, southbound past the derelict piers rotting on their pins and listing into the slate-gray waters of the upper bay.
“Crystal—”
“Yes?”
“Maybe I’ll play.”
“Oh, good. You’ll enjoy it. It’s just a friendly local tournament.”
“Nine ball?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, you play good. You just need to concentrate.” She turned onto Shore Road, the scenic route that looped along the water’s edge around incongruously luxurious homes in Bay Ridge, where a lot of mafiosi live. We passed beneath the foot of the Verrazano Bridge onto the Belt Parkway.
Why was my mouth so dry and my palms so wet if this was just a friendly local tournament, nothing at stake? I tried to hide my nerves from Crystal, a seasoned pro.
“Are you the tournament director?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do I get a spot?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“What’d you expect?”
“The seven.”
“Forget it. You’re too good for that. I can’t show up with a ringer and give him a spot. Especially a ringer I just slept with.”
“Did you hear that, Jellyroll? No ringer Crystal sleeps with gets a spot.”
“At least not the first time,” she grinned.
I needed a spot. It would make me look better. But I didn’t want to whine.
We were close now. The defunct parachute drop that still looms over Coney Island like a headstone hove into view.
“I can’t pass Coney Island without thinking of Topsy,” I said before I could stop myself, which I probably would have done, but the Topsy story had always troubled me. I never went to Coney Island because of Topsy.
“Topsy? Who’s Topsy?”
“Topsy was a performing elephant at Coney Island about 1910. They treated her like shit and made her mean. She killed three men, the last of whom had just fed her a lighted cigarette. They decided Topsy would have to be put down. They tried cyanide-laced carrots, but it didn’t take. Then they decided to hire Thomas Edison’s people from New Jersey to come over and electrocute Topsy. They chained her up, put electrodes on her ears and legs, and flipped the switch. They filmed the whole thing and then marketed the film. I somehow saw it as a kid. It took several minutes for Topsy to die, twitching and shaking and screaming.”
She took her eyes off the road and peered at me. “That’s a terrible story. Fuck you, Coney Island.” She gave it the finger as we passed. “You’re a sad guy, aren’t you? I mean, sort of in general, all things being equal.”
“Oh, no, not me. I’m a laugh a minute. You’ll see when I play in this tournament.”
We drove in silence for a while, then Crystal said, “My uncle Billy’s not all there. I just thought I’d tell you so you wouldn’t be surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s sort of like a child.”
“Was he born that way?”
“When he was a kid, he almost drowned. He and his father were fishing from a boat off the Rockaways. Somehow Billy fell in. Billy’s father jumped in to save him. Nobody’s sure what happened exactly, but Billy’s father drowned. So did Billy. He actually drowned. He was clinically dead, I guess. They brought him back to life, but the lack of oxygen had ruined his brain. Before my father died, he asked my permission to leave the Golden Hours to Billy and me jointly. He said I could make it in the world on my own, but Billy couldn’t. I just wanted you to know ahead of time.”
I thought about that for a while, dying and then being brought back to life. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of oxygen that blew Billy’s mind but the sights he saw on the other side.
She took the Sheepshead Bay exit. A sign pointed toward Emmons Avenue. “Funny,” she said to the rearview mirror.
“What?”
“Probably nothing.”
“What?”
“Can you see out of the side mirror? You can adjust it with that little knob there—”
I turned the mirror so I could see behind us.
“That blue Buick with four guys in it—they’ve been behind us since upper Broadway.”
“Following us?”
“I don’t know. Hell, maybe they’re playing in the tournament. Let’s make a couple turns.” First onto Neptune Avenue and then into a maze of short residential streets lined with single-family red-brick houses, left, right—the Buick was no longer behind us. “I guess it’s just my imagination,” she said without conviction. “The last few days, not quite a week—I felt like I’ve been followed, like somebody’s back there.”
“Those same guys?”
“No, never the same. It’s hard to know in New York whether you’re being followed or not. Whenever I do something to be sure, like make a lot of turns, they disappear, so it’s probably nothing. But I’m getting sick of making all those turns.”
I didn’t think any more about that because after one more turn, we had arrived at Golden Hours Billiards. It was situated on the ground floor in a block-long strip of two-story shops all sharing the same mansard roof. There was a Chinese restaurant called Wu Fat’s on one side and an H&R Block on the other.
Two little old ladies built like fire hydrants and dressed in black from top to toe, despite the heat, greeted Crystal in heavy Italian accents as we entered the Golden Hours.
I stood in a short line with other cue-toting competitors to pay my $20 entry fee, collected by a bleachy teenager whose jaw dropped when she got a load of the celebrated dog at my heels. There were thirty or so tables, all occ
upied. The players warming up and the spectators standing around waved or called to Crystal. She called some by name, returned a few quick quips, and I realized how at home she was here. Most everybody gave me the once-over.
Then things changed, as I’ve seen them do so often when folks spot Jellyroll. First a thin ripple of recognition passed through the room. It began at the nearest tables and quickly crested in the center. People nudged each other and pointed. Play stopped.
“Naww,” I heard someone say, “couldn’t be.”
“No, it is,” another insisted. “Look at him smile.”
I motioned for Jellyroll to sit in a naked demonstration that he belonged with me as I forked over my twenty. I had brought my own ringer. He’d blow their concentration entirely.
The room was dim, even in broad daylight, except for hot puddles of light over the tables. I liked that. That’s how poolrooms should be. The Jellyroll stir was bolstering my confidence. Even if I didn’t play well, I was still the guy with Jellyroll and Crystal.
What I feared was humiliation. Pool can, in my case often does, humiliate. At a certain level—after you learn how to stroke, not hit, the cue ball, after you learn how to control the ball in order to get position for the next shot, and the next, after you learn the moves—the game steps up onto a mental plane, and that’s where my problem lies. Mentally, I’m lemonade. I think like a loser. But now Jellyroll was helping. While he brought the room to a standstill, I wasn’t thinking like a loser, not a winner yet, but at least not like a fall-down loser.
“Come and meet Uncle Billy,” said Crystal. “Then I’ve got to go change before the neighbors start whispering about promiscuity in Manhattan.” She took my hand and held it while she introduced me to her uncle.
Billy was sitting on a stool near a glass case displaying pool paraphernalia, boxes of balls, tip tampers, a row of cues, and novelty items like nine balls on key chains. He was a long, gangly man with a prominent Adam’s apple that seemed to bob up and down of its own free will. Though he appeared about seventy, he was spry, sporting a full head of wild black hair. He stood up and took my hand in both of his.
“Maybe you’d tell me something, Mr. Deemer?”
Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 4
