One Big Joke

by Laurence Shames

  “Lenny, someone wants to kill me. That’s why I’m here.”

  Traffic was going by on US 1. There were cars, trucks, scooters. The windscreen between the two men’s faces swallowed up some of the sound of their voices. Lenny said, “What?”

  He said it again.

  “You serious?”

  “Serious as a nuke attack. Sorry about your marriage.”

  “But wait a second. Who would want—”

  “Carla’s former boyfriend. Mafia. I think they call it a vendetta. Which I think is Italian for you’re fucked.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “My feelings exactly.”

  “Have you tried calling the po—”

  Lenny didn’t get to finish the sentence, because just then a guy screamed out from the bleachers. “Hey, people are waitin’ to play tennis here. You two gonna parlez-vous all day?”

  By a New York reflex, Ricky yelled back, “Yeah, probably. And screw you too.”

  “Fuckin’ tourist!”

  “Fuckin’ yahoo local!”

  Lenny said, “Ricky, um, we don’t want to get on the wrong side of the pro here. Why don’t we continue this at Pat’s?”

  15

  “Feel better now?” asked Peppers Carlucci, as Carmine emerged from the bathroom of their oceanfront mini-suite at the Flagler House hotel.

  “Better’n what?” the big man sourly asked, then threw himself down on one of the neatly made queen beds.

  Peppers had pulled back the curtains and was looking out the fourth floor window at the still water of the Florida Straits. Close to shore it was a milky green, almost soupy, but the sand soon sifted out of it, leaving a swath of emerald that grew gradually less transparent as it deepened. The sky was mostly clear except for a few distant and cottony clouds tinged that exact same green on their bottoms. Gesturing like a game-show emcee showing off a prize, he said, “Will you look at that? How can you still be bitching with a view like that?”

  “Water’s flat,” groused Carmine. “Everything in this fuckin’ state is flat. Even the ocean. I like waves.”

  “An’ if there was waves, you’d prob’ly say you like it flat.”

  “Yeah, prob’ly.”

  Peppers sighed and sat down on the bed that by default had become his. Thoughtfully, deliberately, he wrestled off his shoes and sniffed his nylon socks. They were crusty after the long drive and they stank. He rolled them into a ball and threw them in the garbage. Then he said, “Carmine, you ever worry that your lousy attitude is gonna hold you back in life?”

  “That’s a good one. Hold me back from what?”

  “Oh, I dunno. New opportunities. I mean, ‘zis what you wanna be doin’ when you’re fifty, sixty? Intimidating people? Breaking arms? Running bosses’ errands?”

  “I’ll be a boss by then,” said Carmine, though he fell a bit short of mustering the bravado that such a statement called for. “I won’t be doin’ this shit for people. People’ll be doin’ it for me.”

  Peppers was examining his toes. There were dry white cracks between the two littlest ones and they itched like crazy. Shaking his head very slowly, he said, “No offense, Carmine, but you ain’t gonna be a boss. I ain’t gonna be a boss either. Know why? ‘Cause to be a boss, there’s gotta be something to be boss of, and let’s face it, what you and me might get the chance to be boss of has been gettin’ its ass kicked for years and years already. There’s gonna be fuck-all left by the time our turn comes around.”

  Carmine half-turned on his side to face his buddy. He badly wanted to disagree with the assessment of their prospects but couldn’t find the words or the conviction. Instead, he said, “Listen who’s bellyachin’ now. Mister positive. Mister cheerful.”

  “I’m not bellyachin’. I’m bein’ realistic.”

  “Why’s it bellyachin’ when I do it and bein’ realistic when you do it?”

  “I’m thinkin’ about our future,” Peppers said. “I’m just sayin’ maybe there’s something better for us out there.”

  Carmine gestured vaguely toward the window. “Out there. Out where? Inna fucking sky?”

  “I don’t know out where, okay? But away from New York maybe. Away from the social club and the meatballs and the heartburn and the aggravation. Someplace new. Maybe even right down here in Florida. ”

  “I hate Florida.”

  “I picked up on that. But all you done since you been here is sit inna car, make a number two, and now you’re layin’ onna bed. You haven’t exactly opened yourself to the experience.”

  “No, and I’m not gonna open myself to squat until a certain unfinished piece a business is taken care of.”

  “Christ, still with the hard-on about the comedian?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Okay, okay. But can we please look beyond that for a second? Like, at the big picture? This job, this ferry thing, this local bigshot. We handle things right, maybe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “Maybe it’s a big pain in my ass.”

  “Maybe it will be. But can we please keep an open mind, at least? And maybe, ya know, try to, like, ingratiate ourselves.”

  “Ingratiate ourselves? Fuck’s that mean?”

  “Like maybe, for starters, try to smile now and then. A little bit, at least. Ya think you can do that, Carmine? Ya think you could smile a little bit?”

  The big man gave it a grudging try. It took several separate twitches to jerk his lips back from his teeth, as if his lips were worked by rusty cables wound through balky gears.

  Peppers looked at the resulting snarl and said, “Okay, maybe it’s better if you don’t.”

  Carmine turned over and put a pillow on his head.

  16

  “So my personal, unofficial rehab thing,” Ricky Reed was saying. “I guess you could say I’ve been trying the love cure.”

  “Or the sex cure,” Carla put in.

  “I was trying to be delicate.”

  “Hey, I’m from Queens. Besides, it’s nice to feel I’m helping.”

  They were sitting over beers in Pat’s small but perfect backyard. The pool pump hummed, wind whispered in the shrubbery. Ricky still had the fake tats all up and down his arms, but now that he’d found himself among friends, he’d pulled off the black beard; the backing left some fuzzy lint behind on his otherwise smooth cheeks. The beard itself, tossed onto the table, looked either like roadkill or a disembodied pubic bush.

  “Totally unscientific approach,” Ricky explained. “Not saying it would work for everyone. And I’m not saying I’ve totally sworn off pills. I happen to enjoy them. Just saying I’m doing a way better job of holding it together, keeping things under control.” As a bit of an afterthought, he added, “And yeah, Carla’s really been a help.”

  In the earnest but inevitably stiff way that people generally respond to someone else’s good news, Lenny said, “That’s great. That’s really great.”

  “Fabulous,” said Pat.

  Then there was a brief dead spot in the conversation as the two old friends shared a private glance, each hoping the other would take the lead in sliding the conversation away from Ricky’s problems and Ricky’s sex life and toward the practical business of seeing if they could possibly get their TV pilot back on track. Rather chickenheartedly, Lenny stalled by sipping his beer. Pat cleared her throat and said, “Well, Ricky, since you’re doing so much better, I was wondering if—”

  “We could head up north and shoot?” said the presumptive lead in Dog Groomer to the Stars. He shook his head with a mix of sorrow, frustration, and temperamental swagger. “I’m sorry. Super sorry. For myself, mainly. I mean, I’ve really wanted this. Big leap for me. But it’s not worth getting killed about, and if I go back to New York, I’ll probably get killed.”

  Carefully, Lenny said, “Ricky, do you think there’s any chance you’re exaggerating the danger maybe just a little bit?”

  “He isn’t,” Carla said quietly but in a tone that left no doubt. “I know the
man. He’d do it.”

  “Have you spoken to the police?” asked Pat.

  “What’re they gonna do?” said Ricky. “Guard me 24/7 just because I ask them to? Just because I tell them someone’s really mad at me?”

  “Maybe get some kind of restraining order?” Lenny offered.

  “Right. What’re my grounds? That he once gave a fish to my doorman? A judge is gonna start handing out restraining orders every time some guy delivers seafood? Pizza? Take-out Thai? I don’t see it happening.”

  The pool skimmer gurgled. People sipped their beers. Pat said, “Maybe the jealous lover bit’ll just die down.”

  “Not likely,” said Carla. “I mean, all in all Carmine’s got the attention span of a hamster. Except when it comes to grudges.”

  Pat drummed fingers on the little table and turned to Lenny. “Do we know the drop-dead date for starting to film?”

  “Hey, talk about insensitive,” said Ricky.

  Lenny said, “Not sure. Morty’s trying to find out. I’m guessing we have a week or so.”

  The would-be star hung his head theatrically. “Can’t happen. It’s a shame, but there’s no way.”

  Carla moved to rub the back of his hand. He was feeling twitchy just then and he pulled it off the table.

  Pat said, “Oh well. There’s always next season.”

  Lenny finally gave in to a spasm of gloom. “And we’ll be soiled goods by then. Expired yogurt at the supermarket. Okay, so it goes.”

  There was a silence. Pat stood up. “Well, in the meantime I’ve got a club to run and I need to get ready. Why don’t you all come down later and see the show? Might be worth a couple laughs. I think we all could use a couple.”

  Carla brightened at once. Ricky didn’t. She said, “Come on, wouldn’t it be nice to get out, hang around with people?”

  “I dunno. Out in public—”

  “Public? Honey, really. We’re in Key West with friends. Carmine’s fifteen hundred miles away. You’ve got plenty more disguises if you really think you need one. I mean really, what’s the harm?”

  

  It was a rare event when Bert d’Ambrosia got visitors from The City, or visitors from anywhere in recent years, and so he made a point of dressing for the occasion.

  Standing in his closet amid the rich and comfortingly familiar smells of moth balls, dry cleaning fluid, residue of Old Spice, and mildew, he riffled through a rack of shirts in linen and in silk, in solids and bold patterns, brooding deep hues and pastels. He wanted something appropriate for a casual first-time chat with a couple of New York wiseguys, or at least a couple of New York wiseguys as they might have dressed in nineteen sixty-eight. At length he selected a classic cotton white-on-white with a narrow placket, French cuffs, and a collar about as wide as a 747. For cufflinks, he chose a pair that were made to look like dice, and whose geometry went well with the offset squares in the embossing of the shirt. Since it was January and the comedy club was often drafty, he also pulled on an alpaca vest, exactly the kind that Perry Como used to wear, in fire-engine red.

  Then it was time to dress the dog.

  He preferred to dress the dog in a matching outfit whenever possible, but since he’d never seen an embossed dress shirt with four sleeves in the size of a chihuahua, he had to settle for a snug wool jacket in the same emphatic red as his vest. To echo the cufflinks, just in case anybody noticed, he snapped a pair of plastic dice onto the dog’s collar as an accent.

  Then he left his condo and began the slow and shuffling walk across Bertha Street toward Garrison Bight. He felt pretty good about how he’d be spending the evening. He enjoyed doing favors for people, and this evening he’d be helping out a few different people at once. Doing a solid for an old colleague from the glory days. Giving some advice and guidance to a couple of young goombahs who knew squat about the local turf. Best of all, he’d be spending some money and bringing some warm bodies into Titters, a place he rooted for and which was not exactly thriving.

  And, of course, along the way he’d be indulging his curiosity, not to say nosiness, about what Fat Lou was after in Key West, this purported big deal that was brewing. So, as far as Bert could tell, it was a win, win, win, and win. He was, at least for one more precious evening, in the middle of something, involved in the younger world around him. He was bringing people together, sharing what he knew, helping out his friends. It was the kind of thing he lived for.

  17

  It was almost eight p.m. when Marsha returned from the New Jersey college where she taught and stepped into the rather threadbare apartment on the stubbornly ungentrified block of the Upper West Side. As she was placing her heavy books on the small oak table in the foyer, the door clicked shut behind her with the particularly dry, hard, unfriendly sound that doors make when there is no one else at home. She hung up her coat in the entryway closet. It rubbed up against Lenny’s coat—the one she hadn’t reminded him to put on when he went to move the car and ended up fleeing to Key West instead—in a kind of ghostly caress.

  She saw his coat hanging there and she missed him. She couldn’t deny it, and she didn’t want to deny it. All she wanted was to understand what had gone wrong and to figure out if it could be made right again.

  It was true that Lenny had been awfully difficult lately, relentlessly glum behind the wisecracks, touchy and fragile behind the wall of jokes. But it was also true that she’d been pretty tough on him. Her criticizing came from love—and, okay, from frustration—and it was meant to help, to nudge him out of the rut he was in. Except he didn’t seem to see it that way; and, in fairness, she had to admit that she hadn’t always been as gentle or as tactful as she might have been. But hell, she wasn’t having the easiest time either. What thinking person was these days?

  Wrapped up in this tangle of thoughts, she went to the kitchen and rummaged through the fridge for some leftovers to reheat. As soon as they were in the microwave she poured herself a glass of wine and gave in to earnest but unhelpful ponderings about the state of the world. It was a disheartening mess and it was putting millions of people into many different shades of rotten mood; but had she and Lenny really been letting it screw up their marriage? Why? Because she vented her outrage by going to marches and he vented his by making subversive jokes? It was the same outrage either way. It should have brought them closer together, not driven them apart.

  She paused in her thinking and saw that her wineglass was empty. Until then, she hadn’t exactly noticed that she’d been drinking the wine, and this made her feel that she’d somehow been cheated out of the first glass. She poured herself some more and continued mulling. Her and Lenny’s differences—weren’t they really more about style than substance? When she had something to say, she said it by way of logical argument; Lenny’s method was the sudden comic ambush. Was it really fair to say that her way was serious and his just wasn’t?

  The microwave dinged.

  She reached in, grabbed a bowl of steaming but somewhat dried out rigatoni, and carried it over to the scratched-up kitchen table. She ate a few forkfuls but soon decided that the food held less interest than the wine. She kept thinking about Lenny’s implacably, undauntedly, relentlessly cockeyed approach to things, and she had to smile to herself. She’d always loved that about him. So why had it been grating on her lately? Because he’d had a bad break and was out of work? Because a dangerous clown was President and people like her were finding it harder to laugh, or harder to laugh without feeling guilty? Was that Lenny’s fault? Besides, it’s not as if he was about to change. He couldn’t. Wisecracks were like a part of his religion, his way of making sense of things, peace with things.

  She polished off her second glass and poured herself a third. She usually didn’t drink much and she pretended not to know why she was doing so now, but in her heart she did. She was drinking to give herself a brief vacation from her logic and analysis, an excuse to drop the A student routine and go slumming through the middlebrow emotions like sentiment a
nd nostalgia. She found herself reflecting on some of the things she loved about being with Lenny. The yeasty smell of his side of the bed. The almost fanatical concentration he brought to simple tasks like flipping an omelet or shaving underneath his nostrils. His loyalty to inanimate objects—coffee cups, sweaters, or like the way he’d get attached to a particular toothbrush and use it till the bristles were all splayed out. Silly things. Trivial things. Probably irreplaceable. Irreplaceable! As in gone forever? That was a brutal and terrifying concept, and it threatened to push her beyond the sentimental and toward the maudlin.

  She poured some more wine and was surprised to find that it was the end of the bottle. As she sipped it, a new kind of fierceness gradually took hold of her and seared away the mawkishness. She decided that she simply wasn’t going to let her marriage end, certainly not over a pointless argument about who was serious and who was not. That would be a terrible waste and she wasn’t going to let it happen. She was going to fix things. She was going to win her husband back.

  But how? She drummed her fingers on the table and tried to think of a tactic, an opening move, at least. She could apologize for her part in their recent tiff, and that would probably help, but on its own it seemed inadequate and a little pale. She wanted something more resonant, more immediate, something that would really show him she was trying to reconnect, find common ground, start fresh.

  At length she felt she’d found the perfect way. With most of a bottle of wine in her mostly empty stomach, it struck her as an excellent idea. Uncharacteristically, she even giggled to herself about it. Fumbling around in the bottom of her purse, she found her phone and called him up.