Balling the Jack

by Frank Baldwin

  “I don’t know, sir. It sounds a little lightweight to me.”

  “That’s because, Reasons, you don’t see the larger picture. This isn’t just about some bad bean dip. Mr. Garrett’s company, Pyramid, is the third-largest publishing house in the city. They probably do five million dollars in legal fees a year. We shine on this one, he’s indicated he’ll steer some of that our way. Now what do you think?”

  I think it’s crossed over from lightweight to bullshit.

  “I think it sounds like a winner, sir.”

  “Good. We depose Prego in half an hour. Mrs. Garrett we do at noon. I want you to sit in on both of them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  GIUSEPPE PREGO WALKS into the conference room looking like a man with two weeks to live. The moment I see him I know we’re working the wrong side of this case. He keeps turning his hat in his hands, patting his head with a kerchief. He looks at both lawyers with worry but with deep trust, his whole manner suggesting that some huge mistake has occurred, but he, Giuseppe Prego, is now here to talk to the good people involved and set the matter straight. I like him off the bat. In a deep accent he tells his side of the story.

  His American dream started when he opened a twenty-four-hour deli in Gramercy Park in 1970. He and his wife worked round the clock, every day but Christmas. In the eighties they began catering small parties for friends and built a solid reputation for gourmet appetizers. They impressed a few upscale clients with their distinctive hors d’oeuvres and found a profitable niche working just the kind of intimate affair thrown by Regina Garrett. The way Prego tells it he made the bean dip for the party, all right, but not with pegrini.

  “You must understand. I work with food twenty-five years. Anybody who work with food know you can’t mix cilantro and pegrini. Never.

  “That night, I deliver the hors d’oeuvres myself. I show them all to Mrs. Garrett in the kitchen. She say fine, fine, except the bean dip. She say it not look ‘friendly’ enough. I want to say, ‘Friendly’? What is ‘friendly’? This is cilantro bean dip. People will not talk to it, they will eat it. I want to say this but I don’t, of course. I say, ‘Mrs. Garrett, you want it to look friendly, you put some parsley on top, just a little, the green on the black look nice—you know, friendly.’ I ask her you want me to do it but she say no, she will do it. So I leave, go back to my store. Then later she call up yelling about people sick and about pegrini. I say, ‘Pegrini, what pegrini?’ She hang up and then two days later a lawyer come into my store with papers. Twenty-five years in the same store and I never get papers from a lawyer.”

  He says his niece Rosa will back him up. She stayed to work the party and saw Mrs. Garrett dumping a green seasoning into the bean dip before sending her out with the tray.

  When he finishes, Prego stands and shakes the hand of everyone in the room. His lawyer, the stenographer, even me and Carter. He looks hugely relieved, dabbing at his face again as he leaves. I’d bet two weeks’ salary the man hasn’t told a lie in his life.

  REGINA GARRETT STROLLS in at twelve-fifteen for her noon deposition. One look at her and it’s clear why her hubby kicked all that ass in the business world. If she waited at home for me, I’d stay in the office too. For old Winston’s sake I hope he has something going on the side.

  She shows up for the session in a fur, perches her ninety-five pounds on a chair and looks all of us up and down. If her features were a little softer she’d look just like the Grinch. The tanning rooms have left her a light orange and her last lift pulled the skin over her cheeks and eyes tighter than a drum. She smokes one filtered cigarette after another. I keep waiting for a poodle to jump in her lap.

  To me she seems exactly the kind of woman who would destroy anyone before she’d slip one rung on the social ladder. As she speaks, her eyes slide around the room.

  Mrs. Garrett says she served everything as she received it. Prego delivered the hors d’oeuvres about 5 P.M. and stayed to put the final touches on the bean dip. He sprinkled a seasoning over the top of it and she asked what it was. He said it was pegrini.

  “The name jogged something in my memory, some cautionary note about its safety, the way it reacted with other spices, something. I raised the question with Mr. Prego but he waved it off. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You can never have enough pegrini. It goes with everything.’ Well, not being a chef myself, of course, I took his word for it. He came well recommended, after all. I felt a little uneasy, but I put the dip on Rose’s tray and sent it out into the crowd. And then … oh, it hurts even to think of it, but you know the rest. As soon as people were taken ill I knew my suspicions were right. I called Mr. Prego immediately and confronted him and he—why, the man denied everything. Denied he had added any pegrini at all. And the names he called me! My word. I know I’m under oath, but I’d just as soon not repeat them. Anyway, that’s just how it happened.”

  And I’m a Choctaw Indian.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIRST DRINK of the day is the best. Cools the head and marks the formal start of the evening. I could use one. I just came from the pad, where I walked in on this exchange:

  “Come now, Mike, remember what we talked about. You don’t want to say the Mets got killed. How about they were defeated? Or better yet, outscored?”

  Mike gets a puppy-dog smile on his face and says, “Right. They were outscored.”

  I left without a word. What is there to say?

  “Hi, Mason. Draw me the coldest one you got.”

  “Coming up.”

  Mason bartends here at Adam’s Curse on dart night. He’s the only real person I know who rolls up his T-shirts and keeps a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve. He slides me a pint, pops a toothpick in his mouth, and leans forward on his hands on the long wooden bar.

  “I’ll say it once. Ready?”

  I nod.

  “But in the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat, psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.”

  “Pink Floyd. The Wall. ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part I.’”

  He shrugs. “That was a gimme. I know you got a big match tonight. Next time you’ll earn your suds.”

  I don’t doubt it. Every week Mason gives me one line of rock ’n’ roll. If I name the band, song and album, our team gets a round on the house. Tonight he went easy on me. When he wants to be a ballbuster he’ll drop something from Hüsker Dü, or PiL. I’ll run it by the whole team and still strike out.

  The match he mentioned is the reason I’m here. Tonight our team, the Drinkers, takes on the Hellions for the Manhattan Tuesday Night Darts Championship. The Hellions beat us out for the league title and this is our chance to even the score.

  It won’t be easy. They don’t make dart teams any tougher than this crew. They play out of County Hell Pub, a blue-collar Irish joint in Hell’s Kitchen. One of Papa O’Shea’s bars, and if you’ve seen it you know why they got into darts. If I drank in that neighborhood I’d carry a weapon too.

  The Hellions have walked off with the last three titles, and their captain, Joe Duggan, is a piece of work. As mean a mick as ever washed onto our shores. I get spooked just looking at him. Thin and strong and pale, with yellow eyes and a bad complexion. More on him in a minute.

  First, a little background on darts. To me, it’s the best bar game there is. Full of skill and strategy, and best of all, you get better the more you drink. Up to a point, anyway. I learned to play from Dad, who grew up throwing for drinks in neighborhood bars in south Jersey. In college I kept a board on the back of my door and played for shots with the fellas.

  One night after graduation, Dave and I challenged a couple drunks to a game in a West Side dive. Loser buys. We beat ’em four straight with their darts. After the last game they showed us empty wallets and the bigger one steadied himself with a hand on my shoulder.

  “So you see, gents, we kenna pay. But a debt is a debt, so I give you this.”

  He handed me a business card with “Adam
’s Curse” printed on it.

  “Go there and see Stella. Tell her Jerry sent you. She’ll put you on a team and you can stop beating up on the likes of us.” They rolled out the door.

  The next day we looked up Adam’s Curse and met Stella, the seventy-fìve-year old matron of the place. “So you beat Jerry, did you?” she asked.

  “Four straight, ma’am.”

  “Don’t let it go to your head. Every time he sends me a new team I let him drink on the house for half an hour. I run eight squads out of here on two nights and Jerry sent half of them to me. Now—you’ll need six players to field a team. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. I’ll put you in C division—the rookie league. You can pick up your schedule Saturday night.”

  Dave and I signed up our whole gang from college—Jimmy, Bobby, Tank and Claire. At first, we saw the team as a drinking club. A chance to meet once a week, check out different bars, get trashed, and throw a few arrows besides. As time went on, though, a funny thing happened: we got good.

  Stella gave us old boards we put up at home and practiced on a little each day. Sunday nights we entered her five-dollar luck-of-the-draw tournaments. Once we got the hang of the league matches, we found we all had the right makeup for darts—we love to drink and we hate to lose. Especially to some of the cows in C division. Every team carried at least one porker, and the lesser teams two or three. Guys who couldn’t make the bar softball team but didn’t want to go home to the wife, with bad breath and bellies that could stop a truck. Beat ’em and they retreated to the bar, but lose and you were in for it. They’d take you aside, give you a few pointers, tell you their whole darting history, if you let them, from the day they first picked one up. Facing guys like that week after week was a powerful incentive to get good in a hurry.

  That first season we sneaked into the playoffs as the fourth-place team and pulled a couple upsets before losing in the semis. We’ve moved up and gone farther each season since and now, in our first crack at A division, we’re in the finals.

  I’m the captain and the third-best shooter on the team. No one can touch Jimmy, our ace, and Tank’s more consistent, but I’m streaky and when I get on a roll, look out. I’ve come on strong this season since resolving not to worry about my form. Used to be I’d spend a lot of time on technique, breaking down the dart throw to its component parts—the proper grip, the angle of the elbow, the release point. I’d work on keeping my head still and minimizing arm motion. In the end I gave all that up. You can’t have a hundred things running through your head when you step to the line. Now I make sure I have enough liquor in me come game time, see the target and throw. Not exactly what they tell you in the videos, but it works for me.

  As captain, my main task is to set the lineups. I decide the order in singles and the partners in doubles. We carry the minimum six players, so I’m spared the worst part of a captain’s job: deciding who sits out. We really should carry another body, because as it stands, if one of us didn’t show we’d have to play five on six. We’re pretty hard-core, though. We’d all miss a work day before we’d miss a dart night, and in three seasons we’ve never played short.

  The chief game we play in the league is 501. Each player starts with 501 points and the first to get down to zero wins. Sounds easy, right? The catch comes at the finish. To win the game you must go out on an exact double. In darts, the double section is the strip of two-inch-by-one-half-inch rectangles ringing the outside of the board. If a player has 40 left, he can only win by hitting the double 20. If he has 20 left, he must hit the double 10, and so on. Doubling out separates the good shooters from the rest, and turns plenty of the latter into alcoholics. A lot of guys can score, but nothing sends you to the bar quicker than pissing away a big lead and losing because you can’t hit that double.

  To have any chance at all tonight, we’ll have to hit our doubles, or “take our outs,” as they say. The Hellions are loaded with shooters, and you can’t give them any extra throws.

  They have one guy, name of Sean Killigan, who I would pay to see. Best player in the league, except maybe our Jimmy. Only the Irish teams come up with guys like Killigan. He’s tiny, maybe 130 pounds soaking wet, but he throws the sweetest dart I’ve ever seen. Comes out of his hand in a gentle arc and hits dead straight every time, whether he’s shooting the top of the board or the bottom. A robot couldn’t land it any cleaner. When he’s on, nobody beats him.

  Killigan has a little problem, though. It comes in a bottle. He’s a first-rate alkie, and when he drinks, his dart game goes out the window. He won’t hit one 20 in three. He has a pattern to him. He’ll stay off the sauce for a few months and kick ass in the league. Then one day he’ll take a few nips on the job, tell off the boss, get canned, fall hard off the wagon and drop out of sight. Just when you’ve forgotten him you walk into County Hell and he’s back, drinking seltzer and nailing 20s.

  I saw him play for the first time about a year back. Right here at Adam’s Curse. Our A-division team at the time, the Dudes, was taking on this same Hellion crew for the trophy we’ll be playing them for tonight. I came to root on the home team, but also to get a look at this Killigan fellow, to see if he was as good as the hype. From all the stories I’d heard, the guy never missed.

  Killigan had been off the sauce all season at the time and was torching the league. First in wins, first in all-star points. Nobody could touch him. Well, he comes through the door that night and I can see he’s loaded. He orders a beer but Joe Duggan comes over, knocks it away and says something low and mean to him in close. His teammates take him aside, pour coffee down him, water, anything to sober him up, but no dice. The match starts and he’s useless. Gets routed in singles 501, and then again in cricket, the other game we play in the league. Duggan pulled him before doubles 501, but the damage was done. The Dudes won going away.

  When it was over, Duggan put his arm around Killigan’s shoulder and walked him to the bar. He ordered him a beer, then pulled back and smashed his forehead into Killigan’s face, splitting his nose right open and knocking him to the floor. Happened right in front of me. Sean is lying there holding his face and Duggan empties his beer on him, says, “Have that on me, you fuckin’ drunk,” and walks out. On the way by me he cuts me a stare and says, “Careful who you root for, college boy.” That was my introduction to Joe Duggan.

  Three months later we joined A division and started facing the Hellions ourselves.

  As for Killigan, by the next season he was back on the wagon and back on the team, as if nothing happened. By midseason, though, he was out again, sacked from his job, kicked right into the street by Duggan, who tracked him down in some rum hole when Sean didn’t show for a match. And so on.

  Unfortunately for us, Killigan seems to have turned his life around. He’s been off the stuff three months now. I heard he got himself a job as an elevator man in Times Square. Rumor is he even has a girl. His arm has never been better, that’s for sure. We’ll have our hands full with him tonight.

  I flag down Mason for another pint. It’s a little more than an hour before the match and the rest of the team is due here any minute. I asked them all to come early so we could get fired up.

  We’ll need to be. On paper we don’t stack up against these guys. Top to bottom they come at you with someone good. That’s why you play the match, though. Call me a dreamer, but I think we can take them, if it all breaks right. They beat us only 10–8 last time, at their place, and I saw a few chinks in their armor.

  For starters, they bring nine guys to every match. You want to play for Duggan, you better win. Lose in singles and he’ll sit you the rest of the night, and spit in your drink besides. We took an early doubles match from them last time and the two losers stood at the board cursing each other, ready to duke it out. That’s their weakness. One big family so long as they’re winning, but get them down a little and they turn on each other. If we can get ahead early tonight, we’ll have a shot.

&
nbsp; Christ, beating Duggan would be sweet. I don’t know what it is about him, but from the first I hated him. Maybe it’s the way he hit Killigan when he wasn’t looking. Maybe it’s the eyes, or because he calls me college boy. Maybe everyone’s born into this world with one enemy and he’s mine. Who knows. Anyway, I don’t want him coming into our place and walking out with this trophy. I want to beat him at the boards, fair and square, and turn that mean grin of his around. Then maybe rub it in a little. Put some Irish music on the jukebox, hold the post-match handshake an extra second and ask him if the losers want a round on the house. Then walk the whole pack of them to the door and call out after them, “Next time, gentlemen, bring your darts.”

  Jimmy’s voice breaks into my reverie.

  “Snap out of it, Tommy. You look like you’re getting laid.”

  I’m back at the bar.

  “Hi, Jimmy. Almost as good. I was thrashing Duggan.”

  “The devil himself. What do you say we end his reign tonight? Mason! A couple pints for the good guys.”

  Jimmy is our big gun. If we win tonight, he’ll have a lot to do with it. He was the only A division player to finish the regular season undefeated in singles—12–0. Even beat Killigan once. Watching Jimmy throw is always a treat. His concentration is total. Once he locks in on the target, Cindy Crawford could blow in his ear and he wouldn’t notice. Sometimes after a match, if I have enough in me, I’ll make a V with my fingers against the board. Jimmy splits them every time. Good thing, too, because he really fires that dart.

  Before he got hitched we used to hustle a little on the weekends. I’d drop a few friendly games to some guy, get him thinking he’s an ace, then ask if he wants to grab a partner and play for a little dough. Five dollars, ten dollars, whatever he wants. He would call his buddy over, I’d call Jimmy, and if we milked them just right, winning each game by a little, we could take four or five before they realized what was up.