syllable. The political groupies come to the convention to bond, cheer, and get interviewed, sure that somehow, in some way, it all matters. And maybe it does, although I doubt it.
Watching partisan political speeches ranks on my list with watching paint dry and grass grow. The conventioneers who crammed every bar and restaurant in Manhattan that weekend seemed to share my opinion. They ignored the governors, congress-people, and senators dropping ten-second sound bites on the televisions mounted high in the corners and lubricated their throats while indulging in loud conversation, handshaking, and backslapping.
A weeklong party was under way, and the folks from the hinterlands were there to enjoy it. Renewed my faith in America, so it did. That Saturday night Willie Varner, Joe Billy Dunn, and I circulated through three Irish bars — we were seriously into Guinness — mixing and mingling. We met car dealers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, implement dealers, two guys who owned dry cleaners, and a bunch of teachers and state officeholders, all here to party and make their voices heard in the national arena. We also met a couple of hookers, one of them a high school teacher who normally worked Vegas in the summer but thought that this year she would try New York, and a working girl from Chicago who looked like she would be a lot of fun. Both of them knew how to party. They soon had a crowd of admirers buying them drinks, so we circulated on. The whole scene reminded me of a plumbers’ convention I stumbled on in Vegas a few years back, although the plumbers were more high-toned.
We spent Saturday night at a motel in Jersey and drove back Sunday to check out the scene. Our New York Hilton parking garage pass worked like a charm. Sarah checked out of the hotel at eleven that morning after a spa treatment; Joe Billy met her at the desk and took her luggage to the van, then Sarah went shopping. While Dunn went back to the van to monitor the bugs I had planted, Willie Varner and I purchased a tube steak from a sidewalk vendor. I got kraut and mustard on mine.
I was still munching when my cell phone vibrated. Trying to get the phone out of my pocket and juggle the dog, I managed to smear mustard on my shirt. Joe Billy was on the phone.
“The only spot I could find in the garage was three floors below the hotel. I can’t activate the bugs from there or receive their signals.”
“How about aboveground in the garage?”
“Not in a commercial van. I even offered the valet a twenty.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve got to get this buggy out on the street.”
“Where are you now?”
“Out of the garage, cruising Fifth Avenue. Even the cell phone won’t work down there.”
“Okay. Let me see what I can do. Call you back in a little while.”
I explained the problem to Willie as we walked. “We need a street parking pass,” I remarked superfluously.
“Doesn’t seem like a difficult problem,” he replied. He finished his dog and tossed the napkin in a corner trash barrel. We hailed a taxi and rode over to the Javits Convention Center.
The street around the center was lined with television and radio service trucks, corner to corner, one after another. People were everywhere, coming and going, carrying equipment and boxes, rolling loaded dollies. One outfit was using a small forklift. There were cops around, but only a few, strolling and observing.
“Even if we get a pass, we have to find a space near the hotel to park,” Willie said.
“The space is tomorrow’s problem,” I told him. “The pass is today’s.”
The passes were taped to the passenger’s window of the trucks.
We intended to walk around the entire building, looking for a likely truck, but we were only halfway when our moment came. A crew was unloading the back of a truck using dollies. The passenger door was standing open; the cab was empty. Without a word Willie climbed into the cab and closed the door.
I stood on the sidewalk with my back to the cab, watching the men loading boxes on a dolly at the back end of the truck.
Two minutes later Willie joined me. “Got it,” he said. “Cut it off with my pocketknife.”
We walked away. When Joe Billy motored by the corner we were on ten minutes later, we gave the pass to him. All he had to do was tape it in the window. And find a parking place near the hotel.
Willie and I rode the subway out to Yankee Stadium to improve our minds. We bought tickets from a scalper on the sidewalk for a mere ten-buck premium and settled into seats way up high behind first base.
Joe Billy called in the second inning. He had found a spot near the hotel. The bugs worked. He was now on his way back to Jersey. The game was a dilly, the Yanks versus Boston. Low clouds hung over the city all afternoon, but it didn’t rain.
That evening Willie and I were outside the Hilton watching the limos roll up when it began drizzling. By then the police had the sidewalk in front of the joint cordoned off to keep riffraff like us at a safe distance. Willie and I were huddled under the umbrella when I saw Dorsey O’Shea get out of a long black limousine.
She had apparently been shopping in Paris; the outfit she was wearing was definitely not off a rack. She strolled across the red carpet looking neither right nor left and disappeared into the maw of the hotel while the limo driver and bellman wrestled with her luggage, four hard brown suitcases and a smaller vanity case. I would have bet my last dollar those suitcases were leather.
So that’s the way my life was shaking out. I was standing on the sidewalk in the rain under a too-small umbrella that I was sharing with an ex-con when the multizillionaire hot woman that I wasn’t good enough for marched into the Hilton on her way to a penthouse suite. They weren’t going to put her in one of the suites I had bugged, according to Sarah Houston. Oh, too bad! It would have been fun to hear what in the world she was up to.
And yet, it wouldn’t. The last thing I needed was to listen to Dorsey and some schmuck getting it on in a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suite overlooking Manhattan. And she would probably pick a schmuck, like that outside artist I ran off. After the episode with the porno movie dude, I knew Dorsey’s taste in men was undiscriminating, to say the least. Hell, she had even rolled in the hay with me. I rest my case.
“Wanta go get a toddy?” Willie asked.
“Like what?”
“Like an Irish coffee.”
“How about Scotch on the rocks?”
“Man, if you’re buying I’ll drink any damn thing except soda pop.”
So away we went, two really cool unattached dudes with money in our jeans, out on the town in the Bad Apple on a Sunday night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Monday morning the sun illuminated a hazy, gauzy summer sky. The humidity was already high and going higher at seven in the morning when we set out from New Jersey for Manhattan. Joe Billy Dunn, Willie Varner, and I were in the van, and Sarah Houston was still sacked out in her motel room, which she announced last night was a far cry from her digs at the Hilton. Her observation almost broke my heart. Slumming can be so hard on a girl.
“I have to go back to Washington this evening,” Joe Billy said. “I thought I’d hop a train this afternoon.”
“Can’t you tell them you’re still sick?” He had called in sick before we left the motel.
“No. And I haven’t earned enough vacation to get days off. It’s back to work or go looking for another job.” Fortunately Sarah had taken a week’s vacation, so I knew I could count on her. That is, if and when she woke up and got sufficiently caffeinated to be of some use.
“Maybe we could take Joe Billy on at the lock shop,” Willie said to me. “He could sweep out and work the counter while we teach him how to duplicate keys and stuff.”
“Maybe you could sorta cut class like I’m doing and hope everything shakes out okay,” I said, and turned the rearview mirror so I could see Dunn’s face. “After we’ve saved the free world from the forces of evil, all will be forgiven.”
Joe Billy made a rude noise. “With your luck, Carmellini, you’re going to be still rotting in prison when they find a cure for the common cold.”
