Miami. Chavez had eventually made his way from Liberty City to St. Louis, where he had successfully plied his natural gifts in auto repair toward making a livelihood.
Chevy Dick got his nickname two ways. First, it was his pen name for “Kar Klub,” a weekly fix-it-yourself column he wrote for the
“Shee-yit,” Chevy Dick growled as I stepped into the light, “you look like hell. What’d you do, man, fock some babe in a ditch?”
“Just following your example, Ricardo,” I replied. “Why, did I get it wrong?”
Chevy glowered at me. A couple of his friends murmured comments to each other in Spanish; they were all sitting on oil barrels and cinder blocks, a case of Budweiser tallnecks on the grease-stained asphalt between them. In the background was Chevy’s pride and joy: a coal black ’92 Corvette ZR-1, perfectly restored and completely illegal under the phase-out laws, right down to the vanity tags, which read PHUKU2. Perhaps they were hoping that Chevy would take it off the blocks, gas it up, and take it out Route 40 for another illicit midnight cruise that would drive the cops apeshit; with a speedometer calibrated up to 120 mph, Chevy Dick’s Corvette was arguably the fastest street rod in St. Louis, able to easily outrun any battery-powered police cruiser SLPD had on the road.
That, or they were hoping Chevy Dick would pound the shit out of the wiseass little gringo. Chevy continued to stare at me. He took a step forward and I held my ground. He slowly reached up with his left hand and pretended to scratch at his mustache … then his right fist darted out to jab at my chest. I didn’t move. The fist stopped just an inch short of my solar plexus … and still I didn’t move.
It was an old macho game between us. We had been playing this for months. The gang all moaned and hooted appreciatively, and Chevy Dick’s face broke into a grin. “You’re all right, man,” he said as he gave me a shoulder slap that made my knees tremble. “Now get yourself a beer.”
It was a tempting notion. “I’d love to,” I said, “but I’m beat. If I start drinking now, you’ll have to carry me upstairs.”
“Long night, huh, man?” Chevy’s face showed worry as he looked me up and down. “Jeez, you’re in some kinda rough shape. What happen, you run into ERA patrols?”
“Something like that, yeah.” My eyes were fastened on the case. “If you could spare me one, though, I’d really appreciate it …”
Without another word, Chevy Dick reached down to the case and pulled out a six-pack. There were a few grumbles from his drinking buddies, but he ignored them as he handed it to me. Chevy was no friend of ERA; as he had often told me, he hadn’t seen things this bad since he had lived in Havana under the old Castro regime. In his eyes, any enemy of the
“Thanks, Ricardo,” I murmured, hugging the six-pack to my chest. “I’ll pay you back next Friday.”
The ragged laughter of his buddies followed me all the way up the fire escape to my apartment.
I opened the first beer almost as soon as I crawled through the fire escape window and switched on the desk light. Home sweet home … or at least a place to get out of the rain.
My one-room loft apartment was a wreck, which was nothing unusual. Clothes scattered across the bare wooden floor and a mattress that hadn’t been tidied in a week. Books and magazines heaped together near the mattress and the desk. A small pile of printout on the desk, which constituted the unfinished, untitled, unpublished novel I had been writing for the last few years. Tiny mouse turds near the kitchen cabinets. I could have used a cat; maybe it would have straightened up the place while I was gone.
I swallowed the first beer in a few swift gulps while I peeled out of my muddy clothes, leaving them in a damp trail behind me as I made my way toward the bathroom, stopping only to retrieve Joker from my jacket and place it on the desk while I grabbed another bottle out of the six-pack. The second beer followed me into the shower, where I leaned against the plastic wall and gulped it down, letting the hot water run over me until it began to turn cold.
I cracked open the third beer after I found an old pair of running shorts on the floor and put them on. It was then that I noticed the phone for the first time. The numeral 9 was blinking on its LCD, indicating the number of calls that had been forwarded to my extension from the office switchboard downstairs. Part of my rental agreement with Pearl was that I would act as the paper’s after-hours secretary, so I sat down at the desk, opened the phonescreen, and began to wade through the messages.
Most of the calls were the usual stuff. Irate businessmen in suits wondering why their quarter-page ads hadn’t been run in the paper exactly where they had wanted them to be, like on the front cover. A couple of oblique calls to individual staffers, giving little more than a face, a name, and number: press contacts, boyfriends, or girlfriends, who knew what else? I hit the Save button after each of them.
Most of the rest were the usual anonymous hate calls from readers, which arrived whenever the new issue hit the street, accusing Pearl of running a commie-pinko, right-wing, left-wing, feminist, antifeminist, environmentalist, technocratic, luddite, anarchist, neo-Nazi, Zionist, pornographic, anti-American, and/or liberal newspaper, all of them swearing to stop reading it tomorrow unless we converted to the ideology of their choice. Most of them had switched their phone cameras off when they called, but there was a demented three-minute screed from some wacko with a grocery bag over his head about how the New Madrid earthquake had been God’s revenge against everyone who didn’t support Lyndon LaRouche in the presidential election of 1984.
You can acquire a taste for this sort of feedback if you have enough patience and a certain sense of humor, but the same could be said of eating out of a garbage can. I erased them all. They could e-mail their comments to the paper if they felt that strongly about them.
I was about to twist off the cap of my fourth beer when I caught the last message on the disc. Once again the screen was blank, but the woman’s voice on the other end of the line was all too familiar.
Great. My wife-or rather, my ex-wife, once we finally got around to formalizing our separation. She didn’t even want to put her still-pic on the screen.
I winced and shook my head. I had forgotten all about it. Uncle Arnie was my late father’s older brother and the Rosen family patriarch. A lovable old fart who persisted in trying to get me to attend observances even though he knew damned well I wasn’t quite the nice Jewish nephew he wanted me to be.
Of course she didn’t want him to call. Marianne wasn’t Jewish, and although she had put up with her share of Rosen seders and bar mitzvahs and Hanukkahs, there was no reason why she should be bugged by my relatives. She didn’t understand that Uncle Arnie was just trying once more to get us back together again. Fat chance, Arnie …
A call from Marianne. The first time I had heard from her in almost a month, and it was because I had missed last week’s Passover seder.
For some reason, this made me more depressed than before. It took me the rest of the six-pack to get over the message. By the time I had finished the last bottle, I couldn’t remember why she had called in the first place, and even if I had, I could have cared less.
All I could think about was Jamie.
PART TWO
