Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He told me he wasn’t feeling it anymore. Said he didn’t feel like a musician anymore, said he felt like a broke, wore-out, unemployed housepainter.”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “Help me out with this, Al. I mean, you’ve heard him, you know what he can do, I don’t have to tell you. TJ’s got hands from God. What the hell is going on?”

  “God should’ve given him more than just hands, Doc. He should’ve given him a trust fund or a rich uncle.”

  “That can’t be it,” Doc said. “Do you know how much we could clear doing one weekend up at that club in Boston?”

  “What do you do, Doc, when you’re not playing in BandX? You don’t drum for some band doing weddings and bar mitzvahs and shit.”

  “No,” he said. “I work in IT for a consultant.”

  “I don’t think TJ could ever take care of himself that way.”

  “Maybe not,” Doc said. “He needs to play. But, Al, you know what? So do I. And before this, he would always play, even when he was all pissed off at the rest of us, he would always play.”

  Al put her fork down and closed her eyes. “There’s this singer,” she said.

  She heard the wind go out of him.

  “She’s, I don’t know . . . She can’t be very long out of high school. She’s got great pipes, and she, ah, you know . . . She don’t even have to sing, Doc, guys would pay just to see her stand there at the mike.”

  “Christ.” She looked at him, finally, he looked like he’d been slapped in the face. “What’s her name?”

  “I dunno. The name of the band is Indio. TJ plays piano.”

  Doc sat up straighter. “No fucking way.”

  Al nodded. “I saw them.”

  “These idiots have TJ Conrad and they got him on keyboards?”

  “They’ve already got a guitar player.”

  “Don’t matter,” he said. “For real, if he’s on piano, he’s not . . . He’s just fooling around.”

  “Is that okay? Is fooling around okay?”

  Doc refocused on Al’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Poor choice of words. Give me a couple of days and I’ll find out what’s going on for you.”

  “I hate this, Doc, I hate this backdoor shit. If TJ is moving on for a new band and a new squeeze, why can’t he just say so?”

  “Sometimes a guy don’t know what he’s gonna do until he’s in the middle of doing it. Gimme two days,” Doc told her. “Three, tops. I’ll find out, I promise you.”

  “He’s driving me crazy. I can’t sleep, I can’t work . . .”

  Doc shook his head. “Sometimes it just goes that way, Al. Me and Sheila, we didn’t get it right straight out of the box, it took some time. You know what I’m saying? Sometimes the only way through something is through it. Ease up a little bit. Relax. Lemme talk to TJ and I’ll try and figure out where his head’s at. I’ll call you, okay?”

  “Sure, Doc. Thanks.”

  Al sat behind her desk in the office on Houston Street with her mind in neutral, the street noises of Manhattan flowing past unremarked. Sarah Waters had stepped out when Al showed up, but a series of file folders were neatly arranged in rows on Al’s desktop. One file was labeled LIAB. INS., and Al didn’t want to look at it because she didn’t know how they were going to pay the bill. Another was filled with copies of Sarah’s reports on her work with Sheraton Hotels and Marty’s other corporate clients. Al didn’t want to look at that one because it would remind her how much time she herself was spending on financially unproductive pursuits like the search for Frank Waters and the surveillance of TJ Conrad. Yet another folder was labeled A. WEST, which reminded Al that she had promised to go upstate with Sarah to talk to Mrs. West’s stepson, and she didn’t have much appetite for that. And the one she really didn’t want to look at was labeled OVERHEAD. She didn’t want to think about that one at all.

  Sarah came back in, Al heard her close the outer office door behind her, and a few seconds later she appeared in the doorway carrying a Dunkin’ Donuts bag. She sat down in Al’s client chair, took two cups out of the bag, handed one across to Al. “I actually got out of the place without buying anything fattening this time,” she said.

  “Gee, thank you Sarah,” Al said, reaching for the cup. “When you break a donut in half before you eat it, the calories fall out. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I’m on a diet,” Sarah said, “and you’re not helping.” She fished a small white bottle out of her jacket pocket, rattled it, then put it down on Al’s desk and pushed it forward. “Tylenol,” she said.

  “God,” Al said. “Do I look that bad?”

  “You look like you spent the night in the alley. Have you gotten any sleep at all this week?”

  Al reached for the bottle, lined up the arrows, snapped the lid off. “Hasn’t been a week,” she finally said. “Only been a couple days.”

  Sarah considered that. “BF troubles?”

  “You know what my problem is?” Al said, wondering how much of her rotten mood showed on her face and in her voice. “My problem is that I don’t know how to take a hint. With you and Frank, how did you know it was over? I mean, when did you really know for sure?”

  Sarah took the lid off her coffee, leaned back in her chair, and breathed in the smell steaming out of the cup. “Took a long time,” she said. “Too long, I guess. I suppose I had to decide when I’d taken enough of a beating.”

  “You mean he hit you? You never said . . .”

  “No, no, no, he didn’t hit me. I just meant, you know, all the crap. The job, the drinking, those guys he ran with, not knowing where he went or what he was up to, you know, all that shit.”

  “Did he, um, did he fool around on you?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “He never did it up in my face. I mean, by the end I guess I wasn’t looking too hard, so maybe he coulda kept it a secret, but you know I doubt it, Frankie wasn’t that good at covering his tracks. I know he used to go to titty bars once in a while.” She looked at Al. “If he was stepping out on me, I guess I didn’t wanna hear it.”

  “So what was it? What made you decide . . .”

  Sarah sipped at her coffee. “My mother,” she said, “took my old man’s crap for forty years. She hadda hate him, the shit he pulled. Every day she gets up, every single solitary day, she goes to work, she comes home, she cleans the house, pays the bills, does the laundry, she even cuts the fucking grass, the whole time she’s wringing her hands, she’s saying the rosary, she’s praying to the blessed Saint Jude, worrying about whether or not this old cockroach is gonna make it home or not, is he gonna have any of his paycheck left or not. You know what I’m saying? Every day of her life she’s going around with her guts in a knot, and for what? Hah? For what? What’s she gonna get from this guy? A little piece, once in a while? Oh, Jesus, Al, I didn’t mean to start yelling at you . . .”

  Al stuck two Tylenols in her mouth and swigged coffee. “S’okay,” she said.

  Sarah was still hot. “Anyway, half the time he probably wasn’t even up to that,” she said. “So here I am, I’m home with my kid, and where the hell is Frank? Nobody knows. He’s out with his asshole friends, he’s doing what he wants to do. And then one day it hits me: what is my kid learning? Because you know what, Al, I love the kid to death, but he’s just an ordinary kid, you know what I’m saying? He’s no dummy, but he ain’t no Bill Gates, either, he’s just a regular kid, he gets okay marks, he mostly stays out of trouble, and he plays football, but I know what he wants, way down in his gut he wants his father to be impressed with him, even if he never sees the guy, and then one day I just said, you know, fuck this. I packed up and I moved the two of us back into my mother’s house. I ain’t doing it, Al, I ain’t gonna spend my life sweating where Frank is and what he’s doing, and I sure as shit ain’t gonna have my kid growing up thinking that’s the way a real man acts. You told me yourself, just the other day, I want a cheeseburger, I can get one j
ust about anywhere.”

  Alessandra rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “The next guy, Al, I swear to God if there’s ever a next guy I am gonna tell him straight out: I ain’t your fucking mother. If you can’t do right by me, if you can’t be a grown-up, do us both a favor and make some tracks. You know what I’m saying?”

  “You gonna tell him that on the first date?”

  “Yeah, right,” Sarah said. “You think my chances aren’t bad enough? I start out with that, I got no shot. So tell me what happened. You catch TJ with his hands where they didn’t belong or what? The two of you seemed cool the other night at Costello’s.”

  “I didn’t exactly catch him,” Al said.

  Sarah waited. “So?” she finally said.

  “Well, he’s playing in this band.”

  “Yeah? That’s what he does, right?”

  “Yes . . . But there’s this girl. In the band. She’s the singer.”

  “Yeah? You see the two of them sucking face or something?”

  “No. No, it’s just, I don’t know, every time I see her, or him, I just . . . I got a bad feeling about them, that’s all. He’s been acting funny lately.”

  “Well, you know the guy better than I do,” Sarah said. “But what kinda funny we talking here? What’s funny?”

  “I don’t know, he’s just so remote, and he acts so miserable all the time.”

  “Maybe he’s got hemorrhoids,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, will you be serious?”

  “What, you never heard of’em? They’re in the dictionary, you could look ’em up. Means, if he’s got ’em, he ain’t the first guy. What I’m saying, if he’s not happy, it could be anything at all. Plus, you know what, Al, the world is about half full of women. Give or take a couple. You know what I’m saying? That’s just the way it is. You can’t go nuts on the guy just because he knows a few.”

  Al was silent.

  “Listen, I ain’t saying you’re wrong,” Sarah said. “You know him better than me. But I know you, and you don’t wanna cut him loose, you wanna cut off his Johnson. Am I right?”

  “No.”

  “Hah! Who you kidding? You can’t do it, Al, not yet. You need more than a bad feeling. Right now you got nothing.”

  Al didn’t want to admit it to Sarah, but she was both right and wrong. She was right in saying that all Al had to go on was her gut feeling, but Al knew in her heart that she and TJ had gone off the track, and she didn’t understand how or why. But she didn’t want to hurt TJ, not really, she hadn’t yet felt an urge to cut off any of his appendages. What she did want was to stop feeling like she had opened herself up, that she had given the guy a stick to hit her with, and that he had used it.

  And she wanted to stop feeling lonely. “When my mother was alive,” she said, “she never let me out of her sight. And after, you know, after she was gone I was too messed up. I was too scared. I’ve never had to do this before, Sarah.”

  “You’re a big girl now,” Sarah told her. “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Maybe. Listen, all this stuff on the desk here, do I have to deal with any of this today?”

  “Not if you don’t want to,” Sarah said. “But it ain’t really that bad. First, the guy I deal with at Sheraton Hotels, he recommended us to someone he knows at Hyatt. The guy from Hyatt called here yesterday, he wants to talk. I put some sample pictures and reports together for him. He says he wants to give us a trial run. You might want to look my stuff over before I show it to him. And if we pick up Hyatt, we’re gonna have to do something about liability insurance.”

  “Go ahead and send your stuff to Hyatt. Can we afford the insurance?”

  “Sort of. We might have to skip some paychecks. Like one a month, at least until we find out how fast Hyatt pays their bills. I think it’s worth a shot. Can you swing it?”

  “For a month or two, I guess, yeah. How about you?”

  “Same answer. Plus, if I buzz up to Woodstock to look for Jake West, I can wrap that up and bill his stepmother, which ought to get us a step closer to solvent. How about it? I’ll borrow my mother’s car, drive up this afternoon, have a talk with the guy, drive back. I should be okay, I think. How about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just, you’d be all alone. What if something went wrong? I’d come with you today, but I’m meeting this cop down in Brooklyn, I want him to stick his nose in at Palermo Imports, and I don’t know how long it’ll take to talk him into it . . .”

  “I’ll be fine,” Sarah said. “I’ll knock on the door, tell the guy his stepmother is about to go under for the third time or whatever, she wants to leave him some money. What could go wrong? When you first started, wouldn’t Marty send you on something like that?”

  “I’m not Marty, Sarah, I want be sure you’re going to come back in one piece.”

  “Come on, Al, you gotta be kidding, Jake will be glad to see me. Wouldn’t you be? Some long-lost relative is trying to leave you a big pile of money, why would you have a problem with that?”

  “I suppose . . . Okay, we’ll do it like this: call me when you’re leaving, call me when you get there, call me when you’re done talking to the guy, call me when you get back. I don’t hear from you, I’m coming for you.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Al choked on her coffee laughing, because there was one thing she was pretty sure of: if there was a rational, mature, adult, maternal person in the room, it was Sarah. No matter how hard she tried to change, Al was still the adolescent, she was still the unattended package left at the airport, the one making the ticking noises.

  The car was a turquoise Pontiac Sunfire which had not been driven much of anywhere in a very long time. Its normal commute was from parking spot to parking spot within a three-block radius of Sarah’s mother’s house. Sarah got in and started the car, sat there wondering, while it warmed up, what aridity, what dearth of imagination, what poverty of spirit would motivate one to go out and pay actual money for such an appalling vehicle. Sarah had driven it before and she knew what it was like: it waddled along like a duck too short to walk properly and too fat to fly. It astonished her to realize that some designer had dreamed the thing up, that a team of engineers had made drawings and scale models, that some executive had pitched the thing to a design committee. “Fat, slow, and ugly, that’s what the American consumer wants this year! Everyone on board here?” But it was free, except for the gas she would burn and the tolls she would pay, so she clunked it into gear and eased away from the curb.

  Sarah chose to ignore the advice of MapQuest, Yahoo! maps, and all their on-line brethren and instead of heading north through the city she pointed the thing in the direction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Her way might be longer and slower, but she would rather cross Staten Island over into New Jersey than brave the peculiar sort of vehicular combat that too often categorized traveling by car into or through New York City. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to drive, but she knew that she could not compete with the commuters, many of whom seemed alternately suicidal or homicidal.

  The Jersey Turnpike would be bad enough.

  Staten Island smelled like sour milk. It was home to a series of huge earth-covered mounds. They were the ghosts of garbage past, and could no doubt be seen and perhaps smelled from space. Still, people lived in the area and Sarah supposed that after a while they got used to the stink, but to her the whole island was redolent of something that should have been taken out to the curb a couple of weeks ago. She finally reached the narrow, antiquated bridge that spanned Arthur Kill over into Jersey. She didn’t know how the waterway had gotten its name, perhaps some poor soul named Arthur had been foolish enough to drink the water and thus met his untimely end . . .

  New Jersey’s chemical reek was not much of an improvement. Sarah closed the car’s vents and shut the fan off, hoping the rancid smell would die down. She watched the signs carefully, she needed to make sure she took the correct exit ramp, the one that would put her on t
he northbound side of the New Jersey Turnpike. The other cars bleated at her, impatient because she did not take the exit at twice the posted speed limit. The honking and impolite gesturing did not bother Sarah in the least. She did what she needed to do, calmly and rationally.

  Like always.

  As she headed north, the city lay off to her right. It was beautiful in its own way, silent witness to the artist inside the soul of man, but over in Jersey it seemed as though someone had ripped the covers off the machinery that made it all work, exposing the guts, the necessary miles of plumbing and wiring that spanned the oily swamplands, the twisted intestines of oil refineries which were dotted with gnarled towers tipped with oddly hued flames, and huge metal fans blasting yellow-tinged air into the sky. City life was really all Sarah had ever known and she thought she was used to the costs, but it was distressing to see the fuming steel entrails that made it all possible. She looked at the bright towers of Manhattan, glittering on the far side of the Hudson River. You cannot live there, she thought, without being responsible for at least a part of this, and it was no good pretending that it didn’t touch you. She drove for another hour before she got clear of it, up where the industrial forests finally gave way to thickets of houses and apartment buildings. So easy, she thought, so easy to hide inside your little place in Brooklyn and pretend that none of this existed.

  She was almost to the northern end of the turnpike when she got off and headed for the Garden State Parkway. She paid her toll to get on and immediately the aura of the state changed abruptly. Jersey looked like Eden from the parkway, it was all trees and rolling swells of carefully tended grass, but the lights from the shopping malls winked at her through the green, reminding her not to be fooled by the façade. And the parkway was far more than just another highway, it did not simply lie there and ease you on your way, the parkway was a machine in its own right, with armies of caretakers, maintenance men, toll collectors, and cops. New Jersey politicians have refined the art of conniving to a level not even dreamed of by your average Brooklyn mobster, and now there was an Authority dedicated to the parkway, lest it get up and decamp to friendlier locales. The Authority was dedicated as well to the employment and prosperity of everyone who’d been appointed to said Authority by some local or state politician. Indeed, almost every road worth its salt had a similar Authority and was similarly staffed. There must be something in the water in Jersey, because every little piss-ant town and borough had its own separate police force, Jersey had state cops, town cops, county cops, Port Authority cops, parkway cops, and sheriff’s deputies. In Jersey, working for the government was a growth industry.