One Big Joke

by Laurence Shames

  The Club itself was located behind iron grates a couple of steps below sidewalk level, and as the old brownstone it was housed in had settled more deeply into the bedrock of Manhattan, its floor had tilted in a complex way that seemed to involve several different planes. So the balls no longer rolled straight and this was very frustrating; it made the game seem more like one of sheer dumb luck than skill, and sometimes, when guys had had a few drinks or maybe were a little hopped up on something, and the luck seemed to be all against them in a way that was patently unfair and even cruel, they sometimes got angry and came pretty close to fighting. So it had been decided there’d be no more pool games, at least until the table was leveled, but somehow that had never gotten done.

  For a long time, then, the pool table had basically been furniture. Guys leaned against it when they were sipping their espresso and occasionally rested their guns and knives on it when they unburdened themselves of shoulder holsters and ankle sheaths. But a few balls were still arrayed around the felt, and toying with them, rolling them around, feeling their cool slickness against your palm, remained a pretty decent way of shedding extra tension.

  Which is what Carmine da Silva was doing now. The eight-ball looked very black and tiny in his huge pink hand as he kept tapping it rhythmically against the felt. He was saying, “My mind, on’y real question left is do I just whack him or do I whack the both of ‘em?”

  “Her too?” said his friend Peppers Carlucci. Peppers was called Peppers because he ate them at every meal. Sometimes sweet, sometimes hot, but constantly. Breakfast, in with the eggs. Lunch, piled on the sandwich. Dinner, on top of the pasta or seafood or whatever. He asked for them special at every restaurant. Sometimes he carried his own in a small jar in an inner pocket. “Nah, I don’t think you could do that, Carmine. Whack a woman, I mean. I couldn’t either. There’s limits, after all.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, there’s limits,” the brooding man admitted grudgingly. “Sometimes I wish there wasn’t, but there is.”

  “Besides, you used to be pretty crazy about her.”

  “Used to be is right. Fuck did it get me? I treated her good. Better’n she deserved, ya want the truth. Clothes, champagne. Nice apartment. True, it was a walk-up, but come on, she got legs. If I can climb the fucking stairs, so can she. Christ, what? All of a sudden she’s too good to climb the fucking stairs?”

  Peppers said nothing. He didn’t think it was about the stairs.

  Almost wistfully, Carmine said, “I dunno. Maybe I shoulda gone the extra couple hundred bucks a month and put ‘er in an elevator building. Ya think she woulda been happier with an elevator?”

  Peppers just shrugged. He didn’t think an elevator or an escalator or a helicopter or a rocket ship would have changed the fact that Carmine’s squeeze got sick and tired of their whole arrangement and went off with someone else.

  “The part that frosts me?” Carmine went on. “What really frosts me is I ask her why. Why this guy? Why him? And ya know what she says to me? Because he makes me laugh. Well, that really made me laugh. He makes you laugh? This is what a man, a lover, is supposed to do? Make you laugh? How about taking care of you, protecting you, buying you stuff, keeping you happy between the legs. That don’t count no more?”

  Peppers, trying to help, said, “Maybe he’ll run outa jokes. Second, third time through, maybe they won’t seem so funny.”

  Carmine tapped the eight-ball harder against the table. “And it’s not like I’m an unforgiving guy. Hey, we all make mistakes. I was big about it, I offered her another chance. Drop this clown, I tell her. You like to laugh so much, I’ll get ya a pet monkey. That she doesn’t find funny. Some fuckin’ sense a humor, right?”

  Peppers said, “Maybe it’s just a whaddyacallit, an infatuation with the show business thing. I mean, let’s face it, Carmine, maybe that struck her as kinda glamorous.”

  “Glamorous,” echoed Carmine with a derisive snort, now squeezing the pool ball as though trying to compress it into a diamond. “Glamorous my ass. Come on, it’s not like the guy’s a freakin’ movie star. He’s been on a coupla TV shows. Stupid ones. Not even network. Cable. Cable shit inna middle of the night. Where’s the fuckin’ glamour in that?”

  “I’m just sayin’—”

  “Plus which, now it turns out he’s an addict just like the resta those pill-popping misfit geeks. Off to rehab with the other bedwetting losers. Rated exactly two lines on Page Six. Up and coming comic Ricky Reed goes off to detox. Guess that tells you what a big star he is. Two stinkin’ lines. Runner-ups at the dog show get more’n that.”

  Peppers thought it was actually pretty cool to get any kind of mention in the paper anywhere except the crime columns, but he kept that to himself.

  “Well, I’ll tell ya somethin’,” Carmine went on, seeming to chew his cheek as he spat out the words, “he went off to rehab just in time. He’s damn lucky to be sitting in a nightgown in some rubber room with guards around it, otherwise he’d be dead by now. Just wait’ll he gets out. Wait’ll I find him. I’ll rip his balls off. I’ll make him want his pain pills back big time. Funny man. See how funny he is with his nut-sack shredded like linguine.”

  Peppers, a peaceable man at heart if not always under the pressure of circumstance, secretly winced at the image. Then he said, “Well, who knows, Carmine? Maybe by the time he’s back on the street, you’ll calm down, it won’t seem like a big deal. Maybe you’ll be over it altogether. Chances are you’ll have a new girlfriend by then.”

  “I don’t want a new girlfriend.” He didn’t mean to say this; it just came out and he wished it hadn’t. He hoped it didn’t sound whiny or mopey. Carmine was six-two and a close-packed two hundred thirty pounds. He had a big chin, a broad nose, and the puffy, well-insulated eye sockets of a fighting dog. He’d been bred for toughness; other guys respected him for that, but the downside was that he was expected to maintain his public mojo at all times. Showing even a moment’s weakness was an embarrassment not only to himself but to all the guys who looked to him as a model of unwavering and unfeeling strength.

  Still, the undeniable truth was that he was still in love with Carla Faletti and he knew deep down that it would not be easy to replace her. Exactly why this was, was a mystery. What made her so special? She was beautiful, sure, with raven hair and bright onyx eyes below steeply arched brows; but lots of women were beautiful. She was electric in the sack—taut in the torso, clinching with the legs—but those things were sort of standard issue in a mistress. Nice boobs, check; good fingernails, tasty lipstick, check and check.

  But there was something else that Carla had, something unexpected, outside the usual profile, that had made him happy in her company, at moments even thoroughly content, that had given him a blessed respite from the stress of trying so hard to be who he was. And now, too late, he thought he understood what that special something was, and it turned out to be the most galling thing imaginable.

  It was her laugh.

  Carla’s laugh wasn’t loud but it was wholehearted, sudden, irresistible. It started deep in her throat and then sprang forth with a faint little pop of her lips. It was more than a chuckle, less than a roar, the sound of it was deeper than a tinkle, lighter than a guffaw. The laugh was hers alone, and contagious, and her new boyfriend apparently made it happen a lot more often than Carmine ever had, and that’s what Carmine couldn’t stand. It was a jealousy beyond sex, beyond money, beyond power, beyond anything that Carmine could compete with, and the only possible cure for it was to stop this guy from being so damn amusing by killing him.

  “You say that now,” answered Peppers.

  “Hm?” said Carmine. To him, wrapped up in his morose and violent thoughts, the words seemed to come from some distance away and they took a moment to penetrate.

  “That you don’t want another girlfriend. You say that now. You’ll change your mind. You’ll see some babe in a restaurant, a club, she’ll look at you a certain way, you’ll feel that little twinge in Mr. F
riendly, you’ll send over a bottle of champagne…”

  Carmine tried to smile at that. He dimly realized that his friend was offering him a way to backpedal, to erase his brief display of sentiment, of hurt.

  “And inna meantime,” Peppers continued, “life goes on. Like always. What, it’s gonna stop just ‘cause you feel bad about some piece of ass? So be philosophical—don’t think about it. Don’t get all distracted. That’s the main thing. There’s stuff to do. Money. Opportunities. Like this Cuba thing.”

  “Cuba thing? What Cuba thing?”

  “Oh Christ, you really are distracted. What Cuba thing? The Cuba thing I mentioned to you yesterday. The thing Fat Lou wants to meet with us about. You really don’t remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” lied Carmine. “Now I do. Sure I do.” He nodded unconvincingly, then turned his hand upward and let the eight-ball roll across his palm and down the chute of his fingers. It clicked onto the felt and wobbled slightly as it rolled close to the rail toward a corner pocket. At the last moment it veered just slightly to the left, bumped against a warp in the cushion, and didn’t go in.

  5

  Lenny had lain down for a ten-minute nap in the poolside guest cottage that was little more than a glorified cabana with a tiny bathroom added on, and two hours later he woke up to the smell of frangipani carried on a soft breeze that was the same temperature as his skin, and a baffling but serene sense of dislocation and freedom that made him doubt the old adage that you couldn’t run away from your problems.

  Who said you couldn’t? And why not?

  Maybe your problems wouldn’t exactly get solved by running away, but maybe they weren’t meant to be solved. And what did solved mean anyway? Crossword puzzles got solved. Murder mysteries in books got solved. But ordinary problems in ordinary lives played out in ways that were far more complicated and less clear-cut than just solved or unsolved. Ordinary problems in, say, a marriage or a career or life in a city where living was hard, were seldom solved, they were dealt with. Or not. Resigned to. Or not. Acknowledged as things to be worked on or ignored as long as possible and then just kicked down the road until the road gave out.

  The catch, of course, was that as soon as you turned your back on one set of problems, another set was likely to be staring you in the face. And brand new problems, just because they were new, tended to seem not necessarily more important but certainly more urgent. Was Lenny’s old life over? That was a big question, but it could wait. In the meantime, there was the gnawing riddle of what, if anything, was up with Ricky Reed.

  Lenny washed his face and went over to the main house, where he found Pat sitting in the small but sunny room she used as her office. She was paying bills, peering through little half-round glasses as she wrote out checks. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her with reading glasses before. The peepers reminded him that they’d been friends a helluva long time and weren’t exactly kids anymore. He paused in the doorway of the room and without any lead-in whatsoever, he said, “So you really think it was Ricky? You still think that?”

  She slid the glasses off her nose and let them dangle from the light chain around her neck. “What I think is that it’s the only explanation that even comes close to making sense.”

  Lenny leaned into his reply. “Okay, but we’re dealing with comedians and we’re in Key West. Maybe making sense does not apply.”

  “Usual, everyday, normal sense does not apply. But we’re not talking normal here.”

  He considered that, then surprised himself by saying, “S’okay, say it was Ricky. What the hell are we supposed to do about it?”

  Until the words had left his mouth, it hadn’t occurred to him that he was supposed to do anything at all. By nature he was an observer, a commentator, a kibitzer, not a man of action. Besides, why would he stick his neck out to help Ricky Reed, if it even was Ricky Reed, and if he even needed help? Who, really, was Ricky Reed to him, other than the guy who’d brought him to his nearest near-miss as the co-lead writer of an actual TV series, and who then had dashed his hopes and spoiled everything by flaking out? If anything, Lenny should feel like poking Ricky Reed in the eye with a sharp stick.

  Except he didn’t feel that way, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was just that Pat’s reading glasses made him feel suddenly oldish, made him acknowledge that maybe it was getting to be his turn to be the grownup. In any case, he found himself feeling oddly if grudgingly protective of Ricky and dimly wondering if he’d end up with some role to play in the younger man’s troubles. Big brother? No, way too much responsibility. Mentor? Lacking qualifications. Nice-guy colleague with some life-experience to pass along? That much, maybe he could do.

  For some instants, this unexpected impulse to help was simple and pure. But even the purest human motives have a way of becoming quickly tainted by self-interest, and over the course of a couple of heartbeats it dawned on Lenny that helping to fix whatever kind of mess Ricky had got himself into could be a very good thing for himself as well. If Ricky was only in some near-term trouble rather than off to a long stint of rehab, then maybe, just maybe, there’d still be time to shoot the pilot of their show. It was a huge long shot, maybe just a fantasy. But what the hell, why not fantasize? If the pilot got made and the show got green-lighted and caught on, Lenny would be in the chips and in demand. How sweet would that be? A hit would pay for the bigger apartment that he and Marsha had been promising themselves for years. That’s right, him and Marsha. Some success would probably help patch things up. His gloom would lift, his confidence rebound, his wife would see the worth of what he did and they’d start laughing together once again...

  Lost in his daydream, he only half-heard when Pat said, “Do? I don’t think we can do anything for now.”

  “Hmm?”

  “About Ricky. I mean, if it was him, I have to believe he’ll be back. If he doesn’t come back, then I guess it wasn’t him.”

  “Makes sense,” Lenny conceded.

  “Even with comedians and even in Key West,” said Pat, parking the reading glasses on her nose again. She looked at her old pal over the tops of them. He was carrying his shoulders way too high, almost at the level of his earlobes. The skin looked tight around the hazel eyes but a little flaccid at the jawline. She said, “I really think you could use a little exercise. Want to borrow some tennis gear?”

  6

  The meeting to which Carmine and Peppers had been summoned was held in the back room of a restaurant just south of Houston Street. This private lair was separated from the public dining area by nothing more than a curtain with a loud pattern of pink roses, so Luigi Benedetti—aka the Old Bastard, aka Raccoon, but mostly aka Fat Lou—had thought it prudent to station a pair of guards on the flanks of the narrow doorway.

  On the face of it, though, there really wasn’t much to protect in the private dining room. Eight ill-assorted and mostly unhealthy-looking guys sat around a slightly rickety table with a red checkered tablecloth stretched over it. Bottles of Chianti and baskets of bread were arrayed in easy reach. In front of each man was a huge plate of scungilli drowned in red sauce over a bed of peppery biscotti. The sauce was plenty spicy, but Peppers asked for extra peppers anyway. The yellow ones made a nice contrast with the bright red gravy.

  Fat Lou—boss of the Tortelli crime family, or what was left of it after multiple FBI busts, rat-outs, defections, and untimely deaths—sat at the head of the table, his chair placed well back to accommodate his enormous stomach. He had a vast napkin tucked beneath his chin and it swelled across his belly like a spinnaker. He swallowed an epic mouthful of food and washed it down with a lip-smacking gulp of wine.

  Then he said to his underlings, “So you twats think you’ve lived big? You been to Vegas, you been to Miami, you think you’ve seen it all? Well, lemme tell ya somethin’. Wit’out you saw Havana before that asshole Castro took it over, you ain’t seen shit. For us, for our friends, Havana was home away from home. ‘Cept better. No cops. No wives. No competition. Casinos, l
iquor, construction, we made money on everything. And the broads! Christ, the showgirls, the hookers, hottest in the world. Even the little number who lit your cigar for ya looked like Lana Turner.”

  He broke off for another Homeric bite of food. While he was chewing, working the hunk of scungilli around to the side of his mouth where his teeth were better, Carmine and Peppers shared what they thought was a secret glance. They’d been to meetings like this before and they were a little tired of being lectured about how great things were back when Fat Lou was a young man and they themselves had not been born yet and therefore had missed out.

  But the old boss had not survived and stayed on top till the age of eighty-six without being pretty damn savvy. Even through his somewhat milky eyes with the dark bags shaped like Chinese dumplings underneath them, he managed to see everything. Including the impatient and slightly condescending glances of his crew. After a swig of wine he went on, “I know what you cheesedicks are thinkin’. Ya think I don’t? You’re thinkin’ this is just nostalgia, like I imagine Havana is somehow gonna go back to bein’ like it was. Well, it isn’t. I know that. Nothin’ ever goes back like it was.”

  Here he paused for effect. He lifted his napkin, dabbed his lips, let it flutter down again like a shaken quilt onto a king-size bed.

  “No. I have a different reason for tellin’ stories about Havana. Not because it’s gonna be like it was. Because it’s gonna be better than it was. Why? Numbers. Old days, a few DC-3s and a coupla cruises a week made it to Cuba. Now ya got 747s and gigantic ships arriving every day. More suckers, more money. Do the math. But that’s not the best part. The best part is that we’re gonna have our own special way of bringin’ suckers in. We’re gonna run a ferry service from Key West.”