The deal was, if Maureen met someone I would fade from the scene.
We were at the Bucking Bull on West 72nd Street.
A fervent “Oh!” erupted from Maureen when Vitorio strutted in. It was as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The first time Maureen and I met Vitorio Valley was the week before. Vitorio Valley. How’s that for a show-biz name?
He was body-builder sleek and she was wearing a tight green sweater with her nipples pushing at the fabric. They looked at each other and it was instant lust. Vitorio was a wrong dude and I knew it. But I wasn’t Maureen’s lover, I was her friend, and it was her life.
Without being asked, Clive the bartender set her drink down, announcing in deep practiced tones, “Chivas Regal.”
Like Maureen and me, and Vitorio, Clive Paige was in show business.
“I’ll have a Chivas, too,” Vitorio said, exuding his sexiest smile for Maureen. I was surprised he didn’t strip, ripple his muscles, and rotate his tits. He sipped the scotch slowly, keeping his eyes on her while he drank.
“Pit stop,” Maureen announced when Vitorio set his glass down. She spun around, twirling her black skirt, before heading back to the washrooms. You have to know that Maureen had a steel bladder; she never went to the bathroom in public places.
In a very short while Vitorio stood. “Must be catching.” He too hurried to the back.
I sat there pissed off, drinking my beer. Why was I so pissed? Was I hoping Maureen and I would make it again for old time’s sake? Would I do that? Could I? I loved Louise. But to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I wanted.
I liked that I was committed to Louise. What I missed—what I missed more and more—was my youth, and the thrills that came with various relationships. Not just the sex. The adventure. The thrill of the chase.
Vitorio returned to the bar first, smirking like the rutting Cheshire Cat he was. Forming a circle with his lips, he made a slurping noise, nodded at me man to man, bragging with his mean eyes. I wanted to knock his fucking block off.
When Maureen reappeared she was glowing. Freshly made-up, she flashed an enigmatic smile. Bar stool to bar stool, torso to torso, she and Vitorio exchanged breathy whispers and biting kisses.
Abruptly Vitorio left. Maureen’s face fell and I thought she was going to cry. I talked her out of another drink and walked her to Broadway, where I watched her board the east-bound bus. Was I hoping she would invite me home for a drink? Would my answer have been yes or no?
She didn’t ask. I grabbed a cab to my place on Central Park West, ate a grilled ham and cheese, and watched a movie on TV.
During the following week while I made acting rounds, I asked some friends about Vitorio. Word was that he lifted weights and fucked anything that moved. His other favorite pastime was getting into barroom brawls. Enough outlet for anyone’s testosterone. You’d think.
I ran into Vitorio when I stopped at Actor’s Equity on 46th Street to relax in the lounge. Flashing that smirk, he bitched about Maureen calling him all the time. I was angry but I’m no tough guy, so I didn’t confront him. I simply walked away as fast as I could.
Friday, Maureen called me again about having drinks at the Bull.
I could hear the wind blowing through the park. It was supposed to rain. I’d ordered Chinese takeout and there was good stuff on TV.
But Maureen sounded so desperate. And I enjoyed going out drinking with an attractive woman other than Louise.
And something could happen. “Okay. See you there about 8:00.”
“I went down on the son of a bitch!” she yelled before I could hang up. “And he walks out on me like that. What a jerk I am.”
My mind buzzed with words like dignity and self-esteem and self-respect, but I didn’t say any of them. I listened to more ranting until we finally said goodbye. I was sure she’d been going to bed sucking on a bottle every night.
The calendar said September. The wind told me December. No rain yet, but the night wasn’t over.
So there we were. She was hoping for déjà vu to happen in the Bucking Bull––that some guy or the same guy would show up. It was a fair bet that she’d buried the degradation down deep.
The Bucking Bull is a steak house with a small bar. The decor is a cliché of snorting bulls and brave toreros in tight yellow outfits and funny black hats, at the ready with red capes in one hand and raised swords poised to strike in the other.
This night the bar was almost as cold as outdoors. I ordered black coffee and a double Courvoisier. On the music machine Wynton Marsalis was blowing the blues.
I had successfully quit smoking the year before. But since Maureen met Vitorio I’d started again. I lit up, chased my booze with coffee, and puffed my cigarette, trying to form smoke rings while Clive made faces at me. It was illegal to smoke in the bar. That was the routine while I waited. Smoking and drinking and breaking Clive’s chops.
Finally, Maureen raced in. She was wearing a shiny low-cut dress. Blue. It looked good with her pale skin and red hair. “Hey, pal,” she said, pressing her cheek against mine, dropping a blue sequined purse on the bar, and draping a small blue cape on the stool next to me. The cold didn’t seem to bother her.
That’s when I noticed her split lip. The kind you get when someone smacks you. Hard.
I thought about asking what had happened but didn’t. In spite of her battle scars she was still gorgeous, acting as if the world was her oyster. She pushed a bunch of quarters into the machine and danced over to me before the Latin music even began.
“Working?”
She nodded. Her right hand mimed holding a tray. Like many Broadway gypsies, she kept body and soul together waiting tables. She showed Clive an index finger.
“One Chivas Regal,” Clive said, pouring and delivering a double along with a bowl full of cashews.
Maureen tossed her drink down and rapped the bar with the heavy empty glass. Clive obliged with another double.
She had a long svelte body, and though she’d gotten too skinny for my taste, she was still a looker. She was also very screwed up.
One of my oddest memories is of waking up with most of those twenty or so Barbies in bed with us, and Ken, the master and daddy, clasped to Maureen’s chest.
Now I was the pal she told her sad stories to.
With a ballet dancer’s grace Maureen leaned forward, and without touching the glass, delicately sipped a taste of her drink. Smiling, she undulated—that’s the only word that fits—to the music, doing that hands-down-her-breasts move and continuing clear to her thighs.
The door to the Bucking Bull opened, bringing in the dark, cold night air, and the real bucking bull Maureen had been dreaming of. Vitorio.
I had a cigarette in my mouth, but I didn’t light it.
Maureen stopped dancing. Her body tense, she stared at Vitorio. It wasn’t all lust. There was dread there, too. Maybe that added to the sexuality. What did I know?
Vitorio glided over to Maureen, pulled her to him, kissed her, then flung her, Apache-style, across the room. Very Rudolph Valentino. Corny but it worked. They danced, looking great together.
After a big finish they settled in at the bar. Vitorio chugged Maureen’s drink and ordered another round. What the hell. She would pay for them. Maureen talked to me a couple of times to support the fiction that she and I were there together.
Pretty soon I was the invisible man. That was fine for me.
But I worried about Maureen. With each new round Vitorio got meaner and louder. He started manhandling her, grabbing her bare arms and leaving welts.
“Take it easy, friend.”
“Fuck you where you breathe. You aren’t my friend and I’ll take it any way I want to.”
I stood. Not to fight, to get out of there. To give me time to think, I grabbed a handful of cashews and popped them in my mouth. “Maureen …” I chewed and swallowed. “I’m working the new Redford film tomorrow. Have to get up early. You want a ride home?”
Thi
s was a sham. I lived on Central Park West and Maureen was across town near Second Avenue.
“No, I’ll be fine.” She leaned close and whispered in my ear, “He’s okay. He’s just hot for my body.”
Yeah, I thought.
It must have been 3 in the morning when the phone rang. “Hello?”
I could hear her sobbing. “I’m downstairs. Outside the park. I need you.”
“Maureen! What’s wrong?”
“Come and get me. Please, Eddie.”
I threw my clothes on and hurried out through the side door on 83rd Street.
The night was misty, colder than September had any right to be. Foggy, too. Murky clouds raced overhead, alternately hiding and revealing the moon.
Across the street the large, imposing black boulders in Central Park, looking like monster sentinels, cast great shadows on the street.
The wind wailed across the park, shaking the trees. Me, too. I wanted to rush back to the sanctuary of my apartment.
For a strange instant all was blackness and silence. Next I spotted a glint, then a shadow lurking just beyond the glow of the streetlamp. I ran across to the park side. Maureen stepped out of the shadows, her face highlighted by a macabre halo of lamp light.
Her blue dress, sans cape, was torn and bloody. Clutched against her chest, her sequined purse, a cell phone, and an elegant Barbie doll in a sparkling white wedding gown also specked with blood.
A yellow cab pulled up. “Taxi, folks?”
Maureen was in such a rush to get the door open she dropped her cell.
“Wait a minute,” I said, peering at the shadowy ground.
“Forget about it!” Maureen shrieked. “Hurry.”
The driver headed downtown to come around.
“No!” Maureen cried. “East. We’ve got to go across the park.”
I patted her hand. “He knows.”
She pulled her hand away. “Nobody knows.”
After a few turns we entered the park at 86th and traveled the empty road east, past angry stone walls, moonlit hundred-year-old shuddering trees, and through their ground-bound silhouettes.
Above, clouds were scudding across angry sky while Maureen mumbled variations of, “Look for him by moonlight, watch for him by moonlight, he’ll come for you by moonlight, fear for him by moonlight, fear him by moonlight …”
As we stopped on Second Avenue, thunder crashed.
Then came the deluge.
Maureen paid no attention to the rain pelting down. She jumped out at Second Avenue and ran to 81st Street. Her building was on the left, perhaps a hundred feet away, next door to a book shop.
I shoved some bills at the driver and chased after her. By the time I reached her building I was drenched. Maureen was nowhere in sight but I could hear her running up the stairs reciting her crazed mantra. “Seek the man by moonlight, snatch the man by moonlight, catch the man by moonlight, he’ll come for you by moonlight, beware of him by moonlight, despair for him by moonlight. Despair for me by moonlight.”
I raced up to the fourth landing two steps at a time and found Maureen in her apartment, soaked from the rain, sitting on the floor like a child. Her collection of Barbie dolls was piled in her lap and scattered around her. Within reach was a large, heavy frying pan and Ken in a dinner jacket, his head snapped off. Surrealistically, a bit of blood spotted his headless neck.
Trails of crimson led to the frying pan and to the open door of the bathroom and to Vitorio, his head bashed in.
“Why do they have to hit?” Maureen asked of her elegant Barbie. “Why do they have to hit?”
BUILDING
BY S.J. ROZAN
Harlem
Wouldn’t none of it have happened, hadn’t the Landry boy took to calling him “sir.”
His mama named him Rex and he was still resentful. Might have been okay for some boy with a handsome face, but that wasn’t him, and in school all it got him was, “Hey, lookee, here come that ugly Tie-RAN-o-sore!”
Later, when he did his stretch in Greenhaven, when someone said his name, he only heard “wrecks” because that’s what he’d made of his life.
It was a hard life, and nobody gave him nothing, not that that was some kind of excuse and he didn’t pretend it was.
His daddy could’ve been any of three different men and his mama never cared to find out. They stood around pointing their fingers at each other, and at her too, and so he didn’t want none of them for a daddy even if they’d wanted the job.
It meant he raised himself, pretty much, and he had to say, he done a lousy job of it.
But he wasn’t making excuses, how he ended up at Greenhaven. Berniece rolled on him, but hell, girl was probably scared shitless. He wouldn’t never hurt her, but how she supposed to know? What she see, he blown away her side man and was likely coming after her. Fact was, Chico’d porked the gun out, Rex just going there to talk to the brother, see about the rumors he was hearing down at the
Lenox Lounge. Seen Chico with Berniece, Bighead the bartender raised eyebrows at him, what’s up with that? So Rex just wanted to talk to Chico, and he even laughed, so funny seeing little skinny Chico with that big .45. Then he looked in Chico’s eyes, heard his voice, not the words but the sound just piling on. Chico never did know enough to shut up. Rex stood there as long as he could, looking at Chico, hearing his noise, and then a pressure started building inside him, building, building, and he threw himself on Chico and pulled the gun from Chico’s hand.
Next thing he knows, NYPD Blue is breaking down the door. Door was wrecked, and Rex was wrecked, and Chico sure as hell was wrecked. And he heard his own named different after that.
In Greenhaven, anyhow, they called you whatever damn thing they wanted, whatever they thought would get your goat. Most times he let it roll off, like when it was the C.O.’s jawing. But sometimes he could feel it happening, that building. And the next asshole gave him a hard time would find his teeth in the back of his throat. That right there accounted for Rex not making parole until his third hearing.
But he’d made it, and now he was out. And since he got out, no more fighting. No more brawling, nothing, not even with that crew of hip-hop assholes hung on the corner. They pissed him the hell off, bopping like they do, like they own the world. They didn’t never try nothing with him, though. They showed him some respect, behind his ten years at Greenhaven. Still, time to time he think they could use a little pounding.
But he ain’t gonna be the one. He was on parole, next eight motherfucking years. No way in hell he was going back inside, that was one thing for certain. He reminded himself that every time he felt the building, felt his temper start to go, found himself about to get physical with half-a-dozen boys could’ve been his children. Might have been his children hanging there, too, if Berniece hadn’t gone messing around with Chico, if she’d married him like he wanted, way back then.
Anyway, that was way back then. Berniece was packed and gone by the time he came out, and good riddance. He didn’t want no more to do with her, to do with nobody. He had a steady job, hard enough to come by. All he wanted was to come home, watch TV, drink some beer, and go to bed.
Less people you talk to, less trouble you could get in.
So he never did say nothing to the Landry boy.
That boy, seem like no one never gave him nothing, same as Rex. Raggedy clothes and no-name sneakers, tough way to make it on the street. But his mama raised him right.
Kid wasn’t no sissy. He put on that hard face Rex knew, face he used to wear himself. But he’d move out the way when the ladies come home from church, and he called Rex “sir.”
Time to time, Rex wanted to tell him watch out. Wanted to say, That crew you hanging with, they gonna drag you under.
He seen the kid’s face, seen how it light up when one of them older boys hand him a paper-bagged Bud; the kid way too young to drink. You fixing to turn out like me, Rex thought to tell him. You think these your homies, you think you tight with ’em. Next thing y
ou know, one of ’em’s gonna be facing some serious time. That happen, he gonna sell the cops everyone’s ass, yours included.
But he kept his head down. Kid wasn’t his problem, and he never did say nothing.
Didn’t keep him from noticing, though. Noticing the kid on his way to school every day, take his books, try to keep his raggedy self clean. Didn’t cut school like the rest of them no-accounts. Rex wished he’d thought more about that himself, wished he’d kept up his schooling. Well, too late now. No, no one gave that Landry boy nothing but he kept trying. That’s what Rex noticed.
The night the trouble all started, he noticed another thing. Noticed wasn’t none of that crew on the corner when he come home. Seeing as the only way they could spend more time in that spot would be to drag their mattresses out and sleep there, it was damned unusual to see the streetlight and the mailbox standing by themselves.
Next thing he noticed, he was nearly at the stoop when the Landry boy burst out from the door. He looked wildly both ways, his eyes hitting Rex’s. They had a look, asking for something, begging even.
“You okay?” Rex asked. First time he spoke to the kid.
The kid shook his head. He wetted his lips, like they was too dry for him to talk. Seemed to try to make words, but nothing come out.
“Chill, son,” said Rex. “Something wrong? Tell me.”
The kid moved his lips some more, but still there wasn’t no sound. He shook his head again and charged down the stairs. He raced away, sneakers slapping concrete. Rex stared after.
Thing Rex noticed next, someone was pounding on his door.
First, he was confused. He was back inside, he thought. It was early on, and some damn C.O. was thumping his cell door, telling him if he didn’t come out now he wasn’t gonna get no dinner, fuck if he ain’t hungry, see how hungry he be by morning.
But the pounding kept coming and Rex woke up. He blinked around his room, small and with roaches all over but he could come and go and eat any damn time he wanted.
Grateful for a minute for the noise waking him from that nightmare.
Then some yelling, “Police! Open up!”
New York City Noir Page 47