Losers Live Longer

cap, carrying a bucket full of black water and a mop the color of storm clouds. He had a keyring crammed with about 30 assorted keys clipped to his belt. The building’s super. From the corner of his mouth hung a small smoldering cigar like a soggy stuffed grapeleaf.

I smiled. “Afternoon. Was looking to see if a friend of mine still lives here.”

“Who’s your friend?”

I took a chance on the name.

“Andrews.”

His face softened, his mug looked like a flabby kneecap. He had bushy gray eyebrows below which his black eyes were bright but deep-set like two coins out of reach under a grate.

He asked cautiously, “You a friend of Mr. Andrew?”

“Yes. Is he still living here?”

He shook his head sadly. “Mr. Andrew went away. The people who stay in his place are no good. Very bad.”

A vapor of alcohol traveled on his words.

“Really? Well, that’s not right.”

“But I don’t know how to call Mr. Andrew,” he insisted, grieved nearly to tears. “I would tell him of how bad these people are.”

“Well, maybe I could get a message to him for you.”

“You call Mr. Andrew?” His dark eyes sparkled. “Yes? You talk to him, you tell him to call me, Luis, right away. He has my number, but I give to you.”

From his back pocket, he pulled a stubby pencil and a brown paper bag with a pint bottle still in it. He wrote something on a corner and tore it off and handed it to me.

“You tell him about this man and this woman? Specially the woman. She’s…” He searched for the word in English, but couldn’t find it and shrugged ashamedly.

“Bad?” I offered.

“Loco,” he said, and he said it darkly. “When I tell them not to leave garbage always in the hall outside their door, she punch a hole in the wall by my head. I call police, when they come she tell them I was drunk. She lies and says I punch the wall. They almost arrest me. I call the police and almost they arrest me. Ha! But other building people come out, come down to the sidewalk, and tell police who I am. Good building people, nothing like them.” He spat on the sidewalk.

I thought of the woman at the hotel who’d bashed me over the head. I asked him, “Red hair? Rojo? This woman?”

He shook his head. “No, blonde. Like an angel.” His lips contorted with the irony and made a wet-fart noise. “But she’s a diabla. You know? If devil were a woman. You know?”

I described Jeff to him and he nodded his head. “Yes, him. I see him at the garage, the one on Tenth, across from near the pool. He’s not so bad, but she is…she is…”

“Bad?” I tried again.

He nodded. “Bad. You tell Mr. Andrew, he come back, see what these people do. I know Mr. Andrew, he will not like what they do. But I don’t know how to call. You call?”

I nodded my head, assured him I’d make the call.

He smiled broadly. Several bottom front teeth were missing, the rest slanted into a craggy yellow W.

He landed a meaty, callused hand on my shoulder.

“You tell?” he asked again, now with a smile.

“I will.”

He gripped my shoulder and squeezed hard in appreciation. Don’t think it could’ve hurt more if he’d meant it to.

He pulled out the paper bag from his back pocket again, but not to jot down a number this time. He unscrewed the cap and offered the open bottle to me.

I asked what it was. He told me, but it didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard of, maybe he said it in his native tongue.

What the hell, I thought, it had to be nine a.m. someplace. I took the bottle and had a gulp from it.

His grin broadened and that should’ve warned me, but on I glug-glugged and swallowed.

Heavy duty tequila. Tears streamed from my eyes. I whooped and cast out a demon. The warmth in my chest was active and alive, but at least not rebellious.

He took the bottle and had a small dainty sip before replacing its cap. He shook his head, chuckling.

He reached for the jumble of keys on his belt and deftly selected the one he wanted, opened the building’s street door. He propped it open with his bucket.

“You call, you tell Mr. Andrew,” he said and turned his back on me, getting back to his work.

He sank his mop into the bucket’s murky black water and swirled it around.

I walked away, essentially off to do the same myself.

Chapter Six: THE RIGHT CLIENT

I walked, steady enough, retracing the route back to the townhouse the woman had entered. I stopped, again steady enough, but no mistake, I was feeling fine. That good was tequila was good, that tequila was.

I opened the gate and mounted the steps lightly, Vesuvius milk swishing and swaying behind my belt and spreading all through me a warm, cascading buzz. I pressed the bruise on my temple and it hardly hurt.

On impulse, I pushed the single intercom button, no idea what I was going to say when someone answered. I guess, if not for the shot of tequila, I might’ve handled it differently. First gone back to my office and thought about it, maybe done something else.

But I can’t entirely fault the liquor. She shared in the blame. And was the more intoxicating from the very first sip.

It’s not that I believed in love at first sight, just that as I saw her for the first time up close, I believed in nothing else.

She came outside to see me rather than speak over the intercom. Hot, smooth, and languid as honeyed liquid, she slipped out and closed the door behind her. Softly, she leaned her back against it.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

Her frank eyes were almond-shaped and black as a bird’s. Eurasian? A dark complexion, deeper than tan. Maybe the gypsy curtains were more than mere decoration. A small flattish nose over thin lips, the ends of which curled into an arousing smirk. A wicked, impish chin and a slender downy neck with deer-taut tendons and a lively, animated throat.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes yes yes.”

Some wise old freak once said, you can have anything you want in the world, all you’ve got to do is want it so badly it means more than anything else. Lot of people you talk to have no idea what that means. If you’ve never been hungry ever in life and you want a sandwich, you don’t really want that sandwich. But when you’ve been hungry for weeks, starving, no relief in sight—and you come across a sandwich, a stacked, lightly toasted club sandwich, so fresh there’s beads of dew on the pert overhang of lettuce? You want that sandwich.

That kind of want. But fuck the sandwich. I wanted her.

On top of the way she looked, I sensed something I never could resist. She was and/or was in trouble. And I could see from the look on her face she was trying to figure out just what I was. Would I be her knight in shining armor or another dragon?