Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Lenny’s contractors had already finished with the front of the house and moved into the kitchen. Now the decorators were working on the front. The walls had been replastered and painted hunter green. Thick carpet pads were laid in preparation for a lush, dark green carpet. When Rickey and G-man met with Lenny’s dining room designer, the woman had tried to talk them into lining the foyer with mirrors, hanging a big, swirly abstract metal sculpture in the middle of the dining room, and painting the walls orange—she called it “burnt sienna,” but the chip she showed them was definitely orange. Apparently people did scientific studies on these things, and one of the studies showed that this color made people eat more.

  “We want them to eat more because they like our food,” Rickey said, and the woman smiled pityingly at him. He’d finally fired her when she suggested ripping out the tin ceiling and painting some kind of Roman orgy scene in its place. The firing hadn’t gone over too well with Lenny.

  “You can’t just tell my people they’re canned,” he said, calling fifteen minutes after the woman had left.

  “I sure can. Ask your designer.”

  “I wish you’d talked to me first.”

  “Why? No way we were gonna be able to work with her. C’mon, Lenny—she wanted to turn my ceiling into the side of a Mardi Gras float.”

  “Rickey, I admire the fact that you know what you want, but you never seem to consider the possibility that anyone else’s ideas might have merit.”

  “The side of a Mardi Gras float has merit? What crawled up your ass anyway? Wait a second—that designer lady—are you fucking her?”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Or are you just trying to, and I screwed it up for you? Which is it? Cause I know it’s one or the other.”

  “Trying to,” Lenny admitted. “God, you’re such a smug little shit sometimes.”

  “Well, sorry. You want me to call her? I’m still gonna turn down her stupid ideas, but if you think it’d help to let her come back in here and wave some more paint chips around—”

  “Nah, forget it. I’ve been asking her out ever since she designed Crescent, but she won’t go for it. She thinks she’s some kind of high-class professional, ought to be dating a doctor.”

  “Then she’s even dumber than I thought. You’re not my type, Lenny, but you’re definitely a catch.”

  “Thanks so much, asshole. I think I’ll go ask out a stripper to soothe my poor, battered ego. I’m their type for sure.”

  “What, rich?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lenny hadn’t stayed mad, though. Rickey had to admit the guy’s equanimity was pretty amazing. He’d always heard money caused as many problems as it solved, but doing what he loved and making millions of dollars at it seemed to agree with Lenny. Maybe he’d always been like that, and his attitude had helped him get rich. Either way, it was a theory Rickey wouldn’t mind putting to the test. He didn’t have much equanimity of his own, but surely G-man had enough for both of them.

  Rickey went into the kitchen and spoke to the contractor’s crew, who were installing new countertops on the back line. He knew they didn’t like it when he hung around, but he made a point of stopping in every few days, just to make sure they weren’t stacking two-by-fours on the stovetops or anything. They weren’t, so he entered the walk-in and looked around for what must be the fortieth or fiftieth time, wondering exactly where and how that guy had died, and what he had looked like afterward. Rickey and G-man had witnessed a fair amount of violence growing up, but a guy tortured and shot to death by the Mob had to look way worse than anything they’d seen.

  The fridge had been cleaned out, of course, but it still seemed as if there should be some sign of what had happened here. Indelible bloodstains, maybe, or a tarnished face that appeared on the inside of the door and could not be scoured away. Thoughts of the murder would probably continue to haunt Rickey every time he entered the walk-in. He wished he’d never heard about the whole thing, but now that he had, he found himself wanting to know more. He wondered if he should call Sid Schwanz. No, it was probably best not to remind the newspaperman of the story he’d forfeited until they actually had free drinks with which to ply him.

  Leaving the restaurant, he drove over to Annunciation Street to check on the neon sign they were having made for the roof. “Carlos is working on that one right now,” said the counter girl at Signed Sealed Delivered. She led Rickey into the studio, where the signmaker was heating glass tubes with a tool that looked like a larger version of the little blowtorch a pastry chef would use to caramelize his crème brûlée. “It’s coming along real nice,” Carlos said without looking up. The sign was not a masterpiece of subtlety, but Rickey hadn’t intended it to be. The word Liquor, eight feet long, was spelled out in a swooping but legible script. The lettering would be pink when the gas was running through it. In the upsweep of the R would be a blue martini glass containing a green olive. Rickey had doodled this logo on a cocktail napkin at the Apostle Bar one day and had never told anyone how beautiful he secretly thought it was, not even G-man. It was tacky in a way, he knew, but it also had a kind of retro elegance he associated with the downtown New Orleans of his early childhood. He remembered riding down Canal Street in the car with his parents, seeing all the spotlit billboards atop the buildings, gazing up at the Walgreens and Canadian Club signs with their neon and glittering cascades of gold light, thinking it was pure magic.

  Now he was so close to Crescent that he might as well stop in and see if Lenny was there. Lunch service was over and they wouldn’t really be gearing up for dinner yet. Maybe Lenny would have time for a drink. Rickey wouldn’t mind shooting the shit with him for a little while. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago he had been so dismissive of Lenny. There was no way they could have gotten this far without him. Even if somebody else had been willing to put up the money, Rickey couldn’t think of anyone who would have been able to guide them through the whole thing like Lenny had. Other people would have gotten sick of their naïveté or impatient with their bad attitudes. These days, so close to opening the restaurant, Rickey actually found Lenny’s presence comforting.

  There was no comfort at Crescent today, though. Someone had tipped Lenny off that the health inspector was coming, and the whole day crew was scrubbing, boiling, and throwing things away. “You go on and have a drink in the bar,” Lenny told him. “I’ll get away for a minute if I can.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Rickey. “I didn’t want anything really.” He sat in the bar and drank an espresso, gazing around at the orange walls and strangely shaped metal sculptures. He felt glad he’d fired that designer, and wished Lenny could find someone better to lust after—maybe another restaurant designer who could redo this weird-looking place.

  Most of the cooks who heard that Rickey and G-man were opening a restaurant had said, “I bet it’ll be a crazy joint,” or something to that effect. Rickey guessed Liquor would be kind of a crazy joint, but he had no desire for it to look crazy. It seemed to him that every restaurant opening nowadays had to have the sheet-metal artwork, the light sculptures in the bar, the hard shiny surfaces so all the noise could bounce around and around until the sound level was well-nigh unbearable. Rickey had never once imagined his restaurant looking like that. He figured the food could be as wild as they wanted to make it, but above all else, the restaurant itself should be comfortably elegant. He believed people chose their favorite restaurants for two reasons: either they wanted to feel fashionable or they wanted to be comforted. The first set of people would eat at one or two places for a while, then move on to the next hot ticket. The second set, if you kept feeding them well and giving them the atmosphere they craved, would eat at the same places all their lives. At Liquor, the trendy crowd would come in for a look-see, but he wanted to snag the lifers. He believed he understood their mindset, whereas the trendy people were something of a mystery to him. For instance, they flocked to Crescent, but they treated Lenny
’s as if it served a side order of salmonella on every plate just because the tourists ate there.

  He finished his espresso and looked into the kitchen. Everybody was still running around wiping surfaces with disinfectant and checking temperatures in the food-storage areas. “I gotta go,” he mouthed to Lenny, who was standing at a sink halfway across the kitchen rinsing the salt off a Smithfield ham. Lenny nodded and made an I’ll-call-you gesture with his thumb and pinkie finger.

  There was one more errand Rickey needed to run today, something he’d been feeling guilty about. When he and G-man were out drinking with Tanker and Mo the other night, Mo had said something about calling her mom on Mother’s Day. It turned out that Mother’s Day had slipped right past Rickey and G-man. Rickey drove over to St. Charles Avenue, parked in front of Scheinuk the Florist, and bought two big bouquets. They’d deliver the flowers tonight, probably eating dinner at G-man’s folks’ house and then having a glass of Tia Maria with Rickey’s mother. Brenda loved her Tia Maria.

  “Cash, check, or credit?” said Mr. Scheinuk.

  “Can you take a debit card?” With his new high income, Rickey had applied for a Visa, but it hadn’t been approved yet.

  “Absolutely. We take any kind of plastic. Well, except for gas cards and the like.”

  “So I guess I can’t use my old K&B card, huh?”

  The florist laughed. “I love those things. I still got my Maison Blanche card.”

  “I got me a Krauss card,” chimed in one of the ladies working in the back.

  “I got a menu from the Blue Room in the Fairmont,” said the other lady. “The shrimp cocktail cost a dollar and a quarter!”

  “I bet you’d still eat there if they were open, huh?” said Rickey.

  Behind her cat’s-eye glasses, her face grew radiant at the thought. “Course I would!”

  “It’s not the same city any more,” said the florist. “Canal Street full of high-rise hotels. Schweggman’s turned into Sav-A-Center. K&B sold to Rite-Aid, and done took down all the purple signs, too.”

  They all shook their heads sadly; the loss of K&B had seemed to pierce New Orleans hearts deepest of all. The locally owned drugstore empire had made purple its trademark: not just the signs but the bags, the shopping carts, the wrapping paper and prescription labels had all been a vivid hue known as K&B purple, and it saddened people to think future generations would not know this color. The stores had even carried several kinds of K&B brand liquor, mostly inexpensive and not half bad.

  “It ain’t the same,” one of the ladies echoed.

  Lifers, Rickey thought. Bless their hearts and send them to my restaurant.

  chapter 19

  Lenny sat in the bar after service at Crescent, drinking pastis with Chris, one of his waiters. He’d been cooking with the aniseed-flavored aperitif for years, but hadn’t drunk it until Chris showed him how one night. You poured a measure into a tall, narrow glass, then added cold water from a pitcher on the side. As the water mixed with the spirits, it brought out the volatile oils, causing the whole thing to turn gorgeously opalescent. They always drank a brand called Mon Pastis that Chris had talked their liquor guy into ordering. To Lenny it tasted about like Herbsaint or Pernod, but Chris swore it was far superior to either.

  Lenny didn’t really care; what mattered to him was that the stuff acted as a balm of Gilead on his aching back. Back problems came with the job, but a few glasses of pastis created a lovely melting feeling that started at the nape of his neck and seemed to drip down his spine like warm butter. Compulsively he poked his finger into the flame of a votive candle, then withdrew it, then put it back. The small pain helped him to more fully appreciate the relief offered by the liquor.

  “I swear you can see the future in this stuff,” said Chris, who was pretty drunk.

  “What?”

  “When you pour the water in and it starts swirling around, gets all milky—look.” Chris had just poured himself a fresh pastis. Now he held it up to the light for Lenny’s inspection. “You can see shit in there.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Lenny, holding up his own glass.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I think I see a wasted waiter.”

  “Aw, you just don’t appreciate the true beauty of pastis.”

  “I do,” said Lenny, rolling his shoulders and stretching his back. “I really do.”

  As he drained his glass, Lenny saw a figure hovering in the archway between the bar and the dining room. It was the night porter, Polynice, a forlorn presence in his snap-front dishwasher’s jacket and filthy-cuffed checks. “Scuse me, Chef,” he said. “There’s a phone call for you in the kitchen.”

  Lenny glanced at the bar clock. It was 1:40 in the morning. “For me?” he said.

  “They axed for you special. Said it was important.”

  “It better be.” Lenny went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Lenny?” said a voice he didn’t recognize. It sounded muffled, as if the guy had his hand over the receiver. This was obviously going to be the perfect end to a lovely day.

  “Yeah, it is. Who’s calling?”

  “Did you know there’s a warrant out on John Rickey?”

  “What?”

  “A warrant. For his arrest. You can’t get a liquor license if there’s a warrant on you—but you know that, right? What else you think Rickey hasn’t told you?”

  “Look, pal, if you don’t even have the balls to identify yourself before you start slandering people, I’m hanging up right—”

  The line went dead. Lenny took the receiver away from his ear, stared at it for a long moment, banged it back into the cradle. “Shit,” he said. Polynice edged past him, dragging a huge bag of wet garbage toward the back door. He met Lenny’s eyes for an instant, then looked away. As Polynice went through the door, Lenny saw that the garbage bag had leaked a trail of unspeakable ooze onto the freshly hosed-down floor.

  With the heel of his hand, Lenny pounded the wall beside the phone. “Pencil-dick sonofabitch shithead bastard!” he said. He turned around to find that he now had an audience of two: Polynice by the back door scared to come in, and Chris, who had come in uninvited, lurking near the service bar peering at him through the bread shelves.

  “It’s OK, guys,” he told them. “Just a real motherfucker of a day. Maybe even a grandma-fucker.”

  The two young men answered him with solemn nods. They were kids, but they’d worked in the business long enough to know about grandma-fucker days and tread lightly around people who’d had them.

  By 2:30 Lenny was on Canal Boulevard headed home. He didn’t have the energy for the Gold Club or any of that nonsense. Tonight it would only make him feel pathetic, and with good reason. He just wanted to swallow his last two aspirins of the day and go to bed alone. Right now he’d be thrilled if the heavens opened up and God told him, Thou shalt not speak, to another human being for at least three weeks. Rickey and G-man didn’t think he worked; well, wait until they’d had a few days like this.

  Thinking of the bong he’d seen on their coffee table, he contemplated driving over there and asking them to smoke him up. They kept late enough hours that they might still be awake. Lenny had quit everything but caffeine and alcohol years ago and had lost all his connections. He guessed he could find something, but when you owned the place, you hated to ask your runner or your dishwasher to score you a bag of weed. The way things were going tonight, it would probably make him paranoid anyway.

  He wondered if he had reason to be paranoid. The weird phone call had unnerved him a little. Because it had come into the kitchen rather than his office, he didn’t have it on tape, and this bothered him; he wanted to listen to it again and see if he could recognize the voice. Of course, he’d immediately thought of Mike Mouton. Mike was capable of pulling such a stunt. He’d seen the way Mike looked at Rickey that night at the Apostle Bar. Rickey was everything Mike was not: young, talented, good-looking, full of promise. There was
something seriously wrong with a guy who would hire somebody like that, then expend so much energy on hating him.

  Lenny eschewed hatred as unproductive, but he harbored a strong dislike for Mike Mouton. When he first moved from Maine to New Orleans, he’d worked with Mike at the Fontainebleu, a hotel restaurant on Canal Street. Mike was an assistant manager there, and Lenny was pretty sure he’d been skimming money. That wasn’t too cool, but it wasn’t Lenny’s main problem with the guy. What he really hated was the way Mike would suck up to you, then turn around and bite you on the ass. It wasn’t just Lenny; he did it to everyone. He’d implied that the executive chef had some kind of problem with Lenny’s cooking, then denied the implication when it turned out there was no problem. He’d loved to hang around the kitchen and make innocuous little remarks about how the last guy had done a thing, as opposed to how the current guy was doing it.

  After Lenny left the Fontainebleu for a sous chef job at another place, he kept hearing weird, malignant rumors about himself, rumors that could not only be traced back to Mike Mouton but seemed to actually describe Mike rather than Lenny. “You’re not hard to work with,” a cook would say. “Somebody told me they heard you were hard to work with.” Or, “You don’t do coke? Someone told me you did a lot of coke.” Or, “Somebody said you didn’t like working with black dudes.” Ugly stuff, and pointless: Lenny had never done anything to Mike except be competent where Mike was incompetent. He tried to ignore it, figuring he could prove more by behaving decently to his colleagues and employees than by confronting Mike. But he kept track of it and never forgot a word. Now, with Liquor getting ready to open and Mike trying to interfere, it looked as though the old nastiness might be coming home to roost.

  His low opinion of Mike didn’t cause him to discount the possibility that the caller’s claim could be true. He would call De La Cerda tomorrow and have him check it out. Lenny had already decided he was willing to lose money on Liquor. He didn’t expect to—on the contrary, he expected to rake it in—but it was bad business to invest in such an uncertain venture unless you could afford to lose the money. Lenny could, but he wasn’t willing to lose it due to stupidity, his own or anyone else’s.