“The kitchen’s packed with groceries, so we’ll have to believe it,” said Ferguson.
“Who asked you?” retorted Don. He turned back to me. “They fill up the tire from the air hose, and Rootbeer cleans this little patch with windshield washer fluid. I’m wondering what’s he going to do. Punch it? Stomp on it? Stick his fingers in the treads and rip it apart? Check this out! He opens his mouth and bites the tire!”
“Get out of here!” I blurted.
“Pow! The inner tube pops instantly, and before you know it, Old Puncture Proof is flat as a pancake, and there’s Rootbeer, spitting rubber and smiling. Jason, I missed the age of the dinosaurs, but now I know what it must have been like to watch Tyrannosaurus rex lean over and take a chunk out of some poor Apatosaurus!”
“Actually,” said the Peach, “the Apatosaurus and most of the other sauropods were already extinct by the late Cretaceous period when Tyrannosaurus rex began to appear.”
“Well, even so, it was still amazing,” asserted Don.
“I should think you’d be impressed by that kind of degenerate behavior, Mr. Champion,” called Plotnick from the counter. “An unemployed houseguest of a street fighter who comes home bruised and bloody all the time.”
“It happened once, Mr. Plotnick! And it was an accident!” I snapped. Plotnick had been on me all weekend. Most of the swelling was down, but I still had a technicolor face. I turned back to Don. “And Rootbeer screamed all the way home, right?”
“Not really. But he couldn’t talk. We pulled into a 7-Eleven and I bought him a bag of ice. He bit into it, and we sat there for a while. I think I got to know him better — you know — from the human side.”
“You mean the gorilla side,” put in Plotnick, filling up our cups. “You know, gentlemen, you could make a lot of money from Mr. Racinette. Just phone up the museum and tell them you’ve found the Missing Link.”
I frowned at our landlord. “You don’t like anybody, do you?”
He looked at me severely. “The persons I like, Mr. Cardone, don’t cause any hassles, or break into buildings and cars, or go around eating tires and dropping dead all the time. Now I’ve got three persons and one gorilla all living in a one-person apartment, paying less rent than that criminal Hamish gets for something a quarter the size. And this is supposed to make me love all mankind? Phooey!” He waddled over to another booth, where Romeo and Juliet were enjoying a romantic breakfast. “Hey, you — break it up!”
The Peach rose. “Well, I’ve got to get going. probably be late. We’ve got some efficiency experts from Tokyo coming up to evaluate my new improved production line.”
Don held his head. “Now they’re coming from Japan to look at his fuzz-brained ideas! Where next? The moon? How’d he get to be so smart? He can’t even skate!”
I laughed. “I always knew he had something. I just didn’t think anybody would ever have any use for it, that’s all.”
* * *
Because of my black eye, I had to suspend the job search. Outwardly I complained bitterly, but I was rejoicing on the inside. While Don scoured the city for a job, I went to the beach, toured museums and art galleries, went to the movies, and even took the Camaro for a spin to Niagara Falls.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Don grumbled. “I’m busting my butt, and you’re on vacation.”
“It’s my eye,” I explained. “Who’d hire me with a face like this? You heard Plotnick. I look like a brawler.”
Don snorted. “You can hardly see it anymore.”
“Look,” I said defensively, “did I ask your woman to throw me the k.o. punch? As soon as I’m back to normal, I’ll be right out there with you.”
The bruise continued to fade. I actually toyed with the idea of enhancing it a little with mascara. I knew the Stripper was a makeup expert. Maybe she’d help me.
But then Don got hired on as a stock boy at a publishing company, and the jig was up. The next morning, Jason Cardone was once again looking for a job.
Almost immediately, my mind started playing the usual tricks on me. A little dust here, a rumpled sheet there, anything to keep me away from that phone. Then I started cooking again. During the black eye, I hadn’t felt the slightest urge to turn on the stove! I started with dinner, but soon an elaborate luncheon became a habit, too. I began preparing brown bag lunches for Ferguson and Don. I told them it was because I felt bad about not contributing to the expenses. But the real reason was that, by preparing them the previous afternoons, I could use up even more job-hunting time.
Then I diversified into laundry. It was a godsend. Laundry takes hours.
What was the matter with me? There was a time back in Owen Sound when my bed didn’t get made from one month to the next. Why was the sight of a rumpled sheet suddenly so intolerable? Cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing — these used to be nothing more than dirty words in my mother’s list of Things to Nag About Today. Now not only did I do them — they were my whole life!
Was I goofing off? No way! There wasn’t a job on earth that would have me working this hard! I couldn’t believe maintaining one little apartment could be so complicated. Could you imagine a whole house? Talk about a no-win situation! You wash clothes — somebody wears them; you make beds — somebody sleeps in them; the more you cook, the more dishes you have to scrub. All your accomplishments reset to zero. It’s discouraging.
And it doesn’t help when your roommates are such slobs. Don and Ferguson made a mess, but Rootbeer was a mess, looking for a place to strew itself. At the rate he was going, pretty soon the debris from his old abandoned hobbies would be challenging the rest of us for breathing space. The knitting stuff was there in the corner now, too, along with the shortest-lived hobby of all — Parcheesi. (There are no Parcheesi leagues in Toronto.)
One day I got the bright idea to rearrange some of the furniture. But the problem was that the section under where the couch used to be was cleaner than the rest of the carpet. So I had to shampoo the rug, which made everything else in the apartment look lousy, so I had to vacuum the upholstery, wax the floor, and wash the walls. I barely had time to make dinner.
Ferguson and Don hardly noticed the change in me. Between overtime and Jessica, they weren’t around much, and rarely showed up for dinner. No matter what I said or did, those insensitive clods just made fun of me anyway.
“I thought we came to Toronto to get away from our mothers,” was Ferguson’s comment.
Don put it more succinctly. “Get off my back.” Or sometimes he just laughed and laughed until I wanted to kill him.
I didn’t have a hope of domesticating them, but it wasn’t much of a hard sell becoming the personal chef of Rootbeer Racinette. He always came and went on a pretty erratic schedule, but lately he’d been showing up at noon and six like clockwork. We even had a favorite dessert — D-Lishus chocolate fudge cake mix (uncooked) with whipped cream and strawberries. I didn’t tell him what it was. I called it “Cardone Surprise.” I was even managing to ease a little dishwashing into his routine, although when I pushed him too far, he’d be flopped on the floor, meditating, in the wink of an eye.
Fatness was becoming an imminent danger — not for Rootbeer, whose sheer size went beyond such classifications, but for me. All that tasting, eating, and Cardone Surprise was beginning to fill out my clothes alarmingly. So I began each day with a two-mile run around the neighborhood. At first, I used to pick up a newspaper for the job hunt. But sweating off all the Cardone Surprise could reduce The Toronto Star to papier-mâché in seconds.
And the first day I jogged up to apartment 2C without the Employment section under my arm was when I knew in my heart what I refused to accept and still don’t understand: I had become a sixteen-year-old house husband.
* * *
“Excuse me, sir, I know you don’t approve of me,” Don was saying into the pay phone in the deli, “but Kiki and I would really like to see each other … well, I know she lives there because this is the number she gave me.… I don’t t
hink there’s any reason to use that kind of language …” He shot us a pained look. “He hung up again! What a Nazi!”
We were having dinner in the deli Friday night. The one day I hadn’t bothered to cook, both those idiots showed up after work right on time. I guess Miss Lincoln, ace party girl, home ec failure, and heavyweight champion was taking a breather.
“Love never comes easy,” said Romeo sympathetically as Don passed by on his way to our booth.
“You know, Don,” I suggested carefully, “maybe it really is the wrong number. After all, the napkin got pretty smeared up.”
“It’s plain as anything,” said Don. “And it’s the right number. You think a great girl like Kiki doesn’t know her own phone number?”
Ferguson had another explanation. “Maybe she deliberately gave you the wrong number.”
“I realize that’s your experience, Peachfuzz,” said Don acidly, “but no one ever does that to me. Besides, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is her father I’m talking to. He’s got a voice to match his face — sour pickles.”
“A man of taste,” came Plotnick’s voice from the kitchen.
Don’s outlook was generally pretty bleak lately. Besides his telephone problems, and the fact that he still hadn’t convinced Jessica to dump Ferguson, his new job with the publishing company was physically exhausting.
“Oh, it’s a barrel of laughs,” he said sarcastically. “Check this out. A truck filled with ten-thousand-pound crates pulls up, and I lift all the ten-thousand-pound crates down and put ’em in the warehouse. Then I take a different pile of ten-thousand-pound crates from the warehouse, and throw ’em on the truck. Then we have a little cardiac resuscitation, but not for too long, because there’s another truck waiting.”
“They must sell a lot of books,” I commented lamely. “Tell me about it. They’ve got a best-seller. A social studies textbook for kindergarten kids. I read it yesterday on agony break. It says kindergarten is a society, so everybody has to share their toys. $18.95.” He sighed. “It’s not much fun, but at least the pay is bad.”
“I got a promotion,” said Ferguson shyly.
Don glared at him. “What are you now — king?”
Plotnick placed three sandwiches in front of us. “They’re robbing you blind, Mr. Peach! You’re making sewer cleaner money for a big fancy job!”
Ferguson was unconcerned. “I’m up another fifty a week. And besides, I enjoy what I’m doing.”
“Good boy,” approved God’s Grandmother from her stool at the counter. “Money isn’t everything.”
Plotnick threw his arms in the air. “I’m surrounded by crazy people! Oy, here comes the gorilla.”
We all looked out the show window to see Rootbeer lumbering up the street, lugging a huge, awkward package. Spying us, the giant waved cheerfully, opened the door, and stuffed himself and his burden inside.
“You took unto yourself a bride, Mr. Racinette?” quipped Plotnick, pointing at the package with his meat fork.
Rootbeer set it down with a thud, and there was a strange, vibrant ringing in the deli, sort of like the sound you hear just before the alien spaceship lands in movies they play at five A.M. on TV.
“I bought a harp,” he announced delightedly.
I was appalled. “A what?”
“A harp.” Eagerly he ripped off the brown paper to uncover a full-size forty-six-string harp, elaborately carved, and painted gold. “Listen to this sound!” He began running sausagelike fingers back and forth across the strings.
“I’m dead!” cried Plotnick. “I can hear the angel music!”
“Where you’re going, they don’t have harps; they have barbecue pits,” the Peach shot back.
“Mr. Peach, on the scale of annoying between 1 and 10, you’re at least a 12.”
“It’s my new hobby,” Rootbeer told us all. “Isn’t it great?”
Our landlord was unimpressed. “One noise complaint, Mr. Cardone, and you, and your houseguests, and your musical gorilla are out!” He turned to Rootbeer. “So what do you want to order?”
“Your execution,” I said feelingly.
Ferguson was looking at the evening paper. “Hey, Mr. Plotnick, your friend Hamish has a big ad in the Entertainment section. The Pop Bistro’s bringing in a guest chef from Paris, and next week is Gourmet Week.”
Plotnick turned gray in the face. “Thank you, Mr. Peach, for reminding everybody of Plotnick’s favorite subject. That skunk, that weasel, that racketeer, has come up with another fancy way to rob people. What can you get from his restaurant that you can’t get from mine?”
“Food,” all three of us chorused without hesitation.
“Three comedians in my restaurant.” The dangerous stabbing movement of the meat fork belied Plotnick’s beaming expression. “So if my food is so terrible, why don’t you go over to Hamish and throw up your guts while your pocket is being picked?”
“We tried that,” said Don in annoyance, “but some loudmouth told them not to let us in.”
“I look after my tenants,” said our landlord piously. “What would have happened if the police had come by checking up?”
“They do that?” I asked.
“Of course. I would have phoned them myself. Besides, Mr. Cardone, your brother, also Mr. Cardone, told me to keep an eye on you. And when he comes back, boy, am I going to have stories to tell!”
NINE
Gourmet Week at the Pop Bistro was a resounding success. Suddenly our seedy little neighborhood was the hottest place in town, just as we’d envisioned in the pre-summer buildup. Cars, even a few limos, were double-parked on Bathurst and all the side streets, Pitt included, and customers lined up around the block to get into Hamish’s restaurant. It was wonderful, mostly because it was driving Plotnick insane.
“I can’t stand it! It’s more than a person can bear!” The mere mention of Gourmet Week brought out the veins in our landlord’s bald head. He sat like a stone behind the counter, unable to provide table service. “He charges $6 for a lousy bowl of soup; he charges $20 for a millionth of a chicken, it wouldn’t make a meal for an ant; he charges $10 just to walk in the door and listen to that terrible music! He’s a criminal! He should be put in the electric chair!”
I suspended cooking, just so we wouldn’t miss the sight of our beloved landlord brought to his knees. We ate all our meals in the deli, serving ourselves. And whenever we could, we made sure to remind Plotnick that business was still booming down the street for good old Hamish.
By Wednesday, he could take it no longer. I was pouring myself some more coffee at dinner when I overheard him disguising his voice on the kitchen phone.
“I just had supper at that miserable Pop Bistro, and there was a cockroach in my food as big as a Volkswagen. You’re the Board of Health. Do something about it —” Then in the normal voice, “Go and sit down and mind your own business, Mr. Cardone. And don’t be so generous with my coffee. You think it grows on trees?”
Then he switched to anonymous calls to the police, tipping them off to the many illegally parked vehicles in the neighborhood. Soon tow trucks were everywhere, hauling away the cars of Hamish’s customers. To Plotnick’s dismay, the stream of patrons didn’t falter.
We were really enjoying our landlord’s misery until, on Thursday night, I glanced from his morose face out the window to the crowded street. My eyes fell on the Camaro. It was rising, hind end first, above the row of parked vehicles.
“What the —?”
Then I saw the tow truck. It had the logo of the Metropolitan Toronto Police on it, and it was signaling left to pull out and take away my car!
“Hey!” I was up and out of the booth like a shot. As I rocketed out the door, I caught a lopsided smile from Plotnick, his first all week.
“Was that your car, Mr. Cardone?”
I saved my breath for the road race against the tow truck — fourteen blocks, uphill most of the way. I was fuming. From his spot behind the counter, that rotten Plotnick must
have had a perfect view of Joe’s car being cranked up and hauled away. But he’d never said a word of warning.
A last-ditch sprint caught me up with the truck as it waited its turn to enter the expressway. I couldn’t speak, so I banged on the window and hyperventilated. The Camaro was hanging there, a lopsided aerodynamic black hole. Why me?
The driver rolled down the window. “Yeah?”
“Sir! Mister! (gasp) Mister! (gasp) Hold it! You can’t tow away that car! (gasp) That’s a (gasp) legal parking space!”
He looked down at me. “This your car?”
“Yeah! And it was legally parked!”
He examined a clipboard and shrugged. “It’s on my pickup list. You steal it?”
I gulped loudly. Oh, no. Joe’s car was still on the hot sheet. That desk sergeant had forgotten to take it off, after I’d specifically reminded him to.
It took half the night to get the car out of the police garage.
“Don’t you know it’s Gourmet Week?” asked the sergeant on duty.
“Look,” I said, biting back rage, “this is the second time you’ve impounded my car. Please take it off the stolen list.”
“Of course. That happens automatically.”
“But it didn’t happen!”
The man manipulated the computer terminal in front of him. “Look, kid, I’m doing it right now. I promise you, your troubles are over.”
I had to be satisfied with that. But I was far from satisfied with our dear landlord. When I brought the Camaro home close to midnight, I had revenge in my heart.
“Man,” I seethed, “I was prepared for the big city, but nothing can prepare a guy for anything like Plotnick! He took our money and rebuilt his whole staircase, he fixed it so we couldn’t get into the Pop Bistro, he tries to rip us off, he threatens to kick us out, he dumps all over everything we try to do, he calls us names, he’s always spying on us and minding our business, and now it’s his fault the Camaro got towed away, just because he’s jealous of that Hamish guy! Boy, I’d like to get even!”
“Shhh!” Ferguson put his finger to his lips and pointed at the air vent. He unfolded himself from the beanbag chair, and turned on the stereo, loud. Then he beckoned us to a meeting in the kitchen, the furthest place in the whole apartment from the vent that was Plotnick’s communication system. “I have an idea.”
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