know how to be an uncle. So, we’ll learn together. When the hearing’s over, I’ll take you back to Granny’s if they don’t send you off to Raiford.”
He gave me a funny look, like I’d hurt his feelings, but he wasn’t going to let it show.
“ I’ll come down and visit you,” I added quickly, “and you can come to Miami and visit me. I’ll try to do the uncle things like buying you ice cream, taking you fishing-”
“ Or to the movies.”
“ Right. And you’ll do the nephew things like…” What the hell were nephew things? “Like cutting the grass, changing the oil in the Olds, and waxing down the sailboards.”
“ You’ll have to show me how,” he said happily, seeming to welcome the opportunity to work up a sweat.
“ It’s a deal,” I responded, and we exchanged high fives.
“ Can we go to the movies tonight?” he asked.
“ No. I have to meet a client.”
“ A murderer, like Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge?”
“ Nobody ever mistook Blinky Baroso for Jeff Bridges,” I said. “Danny DeVito, maybe.”
I pushed the clutch to the floor, grabbed the chrome ball on the stick shift, eased out the clutch while giving it some gas- leaded, high-octane-and tore up gravel, then burned rubber getting back onto the road. I figured the first lesson in nephew training was safe driving, which I sum up as follows: If you’ve got three hundred fifty cubic inches, use them all.
I live in a coral rock house between Poinciana and Kumquat in Coconut Grove. The house is a two-story pillbox that has withstood sixty years of hurricanes, a number of Super Bowl parties, and many years of benign neglect. Just after nine p.m., I pulled the Olds under a chinaberry tree that serves as a carport and showed Kip how to put up the canvas top. He seemed to like helping. Then I grabbed the duffel bag with all his worldly belongings and led him to the front door, which I opened by banging my good shoulder into the humidity-swollen wood. The door yielded with a groan, or was that me?
Inside was dark and stuffy. I turned on the ceiling fan to stir the soggy air and opened the blinds to let in the green phosphorescent glare of the neighborhood’s sodium vapor anti-crime lights. I cleared some beer bottles from the sailboard that is propped between two concrete blocks and serves as a cocktail table. Then I sat down, put my feet up, and tried to figure out what to do next.
My house is furnished in Early Locker Room. There’s a tasteful lamp made of a Dolphins helmet with an orange and aqua shade. There’s a rusted scuba tank leaning against a planter filled with parched dirt and the fossilized remains of a rubber plant. There are newspapers and magazines and assorted volumes of Florida Statutes Annotated and a few paperbacks by John D. MacDonald.
Kip looked around, surveying my palace. “What a dump!” he proclaimed, and before he could tell me, I said it was a pretty fair Bette Davis. The kid looked sleepy. It hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but now I was getting some vague idea about children’s bedtimes. I had been planning to haul him with me to meet Blinky Baroso on South Beach. Now, I saw the kid couldn’t make it.
I told Kip the bathroom was on the second floor to the left and he scampered up the stairs. I followed him up and put some fresh sheets on the bed in the spare room, a place former teammates crash when they hit town to check into Mount Sinai for a knee replacement or drug rehab.
I tried calling Blinky Baroso to tell him to come over to the house, instead of meeting me at our usual spot on South Beach, but all I got was a recording. Damn, he must have left already. I didn’t even know why he wanted to meet. He hadn’t said much on the phone when he set up the meeting. People were watching him, or me, or both, and we needed to talk. He probably wanted to tell me about his latest scheme to turn horseshit into gold, and I was growing irritated that he was dragging me out of the house and away from my kid.
Whoa, my kid?
Is this what fatherhood-or uncledom-does to a man? Was I finally getting domesticated?
I changed into my client conference attire, a clean tank top to match my cutoffs, deck shoes without socks, then came back downstairs. Maybe I could tuck Kip in bed and ask one of the neighbors to stop by. But it was Sunday night, and Phoebe, a thrice-divorced redhead across the street, was hosting one of her swingers’ parties, complete with bobbing for apples (and what not) in the Jacuzzi. I could do without a herd of her sopping wet friends traipsing through my house, corrupting my nephew.
My neighbors are a fine lot, though not necessarily baby-sitter material in a Newt Gingrich world of family values. Besides Phoebe, there’s Geoffrey, who works nights cruising the expressways looking for fiery car crashes to videotape, and Mako, who lives in a wooden treehouse on the other side of the limeberry shrubs. To visit, you have to climb a rope ladder, something that discourages process servers. Mako trades his custom-made hammocks for crawfish with Homer Thigpen, a lobster pot poacher who lives in the first house on Poinciana. I helped Homer beat a federal charge that could have cost him his boat under the forfeiture laws, and ever since, and I’ve been knee- deep in Florida lobster, some of them even corralled in season. I haven’t felt so warm and fuzzy about the majesty of the legal system since I walked a parking meter thief who paid my fee in quarters and dimes.
I heard the water running upstairs and yelled at Kip to make sure he brushed his teeth. “Up and down strokes,” I ordered.
I was feeling uneasy about leaving him alone in a strange house. He was a good kid. Okay, so he smashed a window and spray-painted the South Miami Cineplex with a pretty fair drawing of Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a shotgun. “ Hasta la vista, baby,” Arnold was saying in a cartoon bubble of iridescent blue paint.
It was an understandable protest by a kid who had ridden the bus from Islamorada to see Casablanca on the big screen only to discover that the theater had, without notice, substituted Revenge of the Nerds III. I thought the theater manager overreacted in reporting the incident as a terrorist act, and when Kip asked, I assured him he wouldn’t get the chair like Jimmy Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces.
I was thinking about the juvenile court hearing when Kip came back down the stairs. He had changed into his pajamas, I thought at first, but then I saw he was wearing an old Dolphins jersey than hung down past his knees. “I found this in the closet,” he said. “Okay if I wear it to sleep?”
He turned around, modeling it. Across his back, the lettering said LASSITER. Below was the number, fifty- eight. “Looks great on you,” I said. “It’s yours.”
He smiled, stifled a yawn with a dainty fist, and came up to me. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I figured it out after a second. I gave him a good-night hug, then on impulse, scooped him into my arms. We went up the stairs that way, his legs curled around me, and I dropped him into bed and pulled up the sheet to his chin.
“ Good night, Kip.”
“ Good night, Uncle Jake,” he said, his eyes half closed, his face a tranquil reflection of childlike innocence.
I took Douglas Road up to Grand Avenue, hung a right and headed into downtown Coconut Grove. To avoid the teeny boppers cruising Cocowalk on a Sunday night, I swung onto Oak and then by Tigertail going north. I turned left on Seventeenth Avenue, picked up I-95 to hook up with the MacArthur Causeway and drove east across the bay to Miami Beach. I found a parking spot next to a Dumpster behind a sushi bar and walked to the coral rock wall that runs along the east side of Ocean Drive.
A three-quarter moon was hanging above the ocean, spreading a creamy glow across the black water. A warm breeze from the southeast swirled sand across the sidewalk and into the street. Lovers of every persuasion strolled by the sidewalk cafes across the street, and the usual collection of models, photographers, would-be actors, wannabe trendies, and assorted semi-hipsters crowded the sidewalk, pausing long enough to be ogled by patrons sipping decaf cappuccino under Campari umbrellas. This season’s color seemed to be black. Billowing black silk pants, square-cut black jackets with shoulder pads over white T-shirts. And those were the men. The women wore black minis and black fishnet stockings.
As is my custom, I was on time. It is a harmless obsession. I don’t like to be kept waiting, and it’s only fair to
