Don Dimaio of La Plata

by Robert Arellano

  “Wow!”

  “Of course, I’m just one of a dozen keepers. I’m only here five nights from 9 until 6. You two are in charge of the real zoo.” Cantare and I both oblige with a heh heh. “I’ll run ahead and wake the baby, make sure mom’s docile. You know the way, Mayor?”

  “You bet, Andy.”

  “Here, take the flashlight.”

  “Hank and I will be right behind you. We’ll try not to disturb any of the sleeping creatures.” Andy scampers away.

  Cantare says, “How do you do it, Pally, remembering everybody’s names?”

  “I told you before. It’s mnemonics. Makes people happy.”

  “But everybody? I mean, for Christ’s sake, the night zookeeper!”

  “‘Animal Andy.’ How many favors big and small have you gotten simply for remembering someone’s name?” I snap off the flashlight to soak in the night. Cantare rests a hand on my shoulder. “Eyes adjusting okay, Hank?”

  “Can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  We continue up the dark path. The rush of the nearby highway is drowned in the prehistoric music of La Plata wetlands: invisible crickets at their racket and murmuring toads who want to snack on those crackling wings. Our footfall, heavier than the soft-shoed zookeeper’s, sends gobs of croaking monsters plop-plopping into the pond for refuge. This triggers the slumbering ducks, who shoosh from their beds in the reeds. Cantare says, “It sounds like summer here.”

  “Marsh country. It’s like this year round. It used to be this way all over this part of the world before the cities came along.”

  The Arctic Ocean window looms midnight blue as we pass. Something blooms darkly in the glass for a second, spins, and disappears. The sea lion swims laps in this tank all night, making up fifty yards at a stretch for the million miles he’d migrate in his lifetime. I lead Cantare to the adjacent aquarium. He steps warily around the edge, staring into the dark depths. “What’s it going to be, Pally? Barracuda? Shark?”

  “Shut up. You’ll see.”

  Andy has successfully coaxed the pup onto the poolside platform while his sedated mother hibernates in the den. I flip the switch in the wall of fake rock, bathing the baby in cool, electric moonlight. “My God!” says Hank, “he’s a living teddy!”

  “Hm,” Andy says, “but he’s already got the strength to rip a man’s finger off. In a few months it will be an arm. Then we’ll have to give him a shot before handling just like we do his mom.”

  “You know, Andy, if Hank could get people to contribute to my campaign the way this little guy’s gotten donors to fork over to the zoo, I could buy national spots on all the major networks.”

  “What good would that do, Mayor? It’s a local election.”

  “I’m not talking about mayor, Andy. I’m talking about president. Heh heh.”

  “Oh, boy! You’d win, too.”

  Squatting over the infant polar bear, Cantare’s face gets a mothering look. “His fleece is white as snow.”

  Next, Andy gives us a tour of the primates. “Marmosets are from Central and South America. They’ve got claws instead of nails. And these fellows, the white-cheeked gibbons, are from Asia.” While the rest of the tribe brood in fake trees in their tranquilized stupors, one gibbon fidgets on the lip of a stone basin. “We’ve got this guy sedated at the maximum dose but he still exhibits antisocial tendencies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Aggression towards females. Frequent masturbation.”

  Cantare says, “Check out that crazy monkey!”

  “Ape,” says Andy.

  “Huh?”

  “Monkeys have tails. Apes do not. Gibbons have no tails, so they are not monkeys at all. They are apes.”

  “Where’d you say they come from?”

  “Southeast Asia. But their natural habitat is rapidly dwindling due to overforestation.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means when you’re out shopping for furniture, don’t buy tropical hardwoods.”

  Cantare says, “Oops.”

  “Hey, Andy, let’s check in on the orangutans.”

  “You two go ahead, boss. I’d like to stay here for a minute.” Andy and I head next door to Borneo and let Cantare linger with the gibbons.

  “How’s the wildlife treating you, Andy?”

  “Love it, Mayor. In the brighter months I say good morning to as many of the diurnals as I can, and I always visit with the nocturnals. Some of them enjoy it when I give them a special feeding—throwing mice in the air for the owls, for instance. Makes them feel like they’re still hunting.” Andy is one of those robust loners who don’t see much daylight and stay at the job for the whole of their lives—and somehow, when they die, another nut who clearly wouldn’t be suited for any other career comes along and replaces them. Sounds like fun, but it would drive any normal guy crazy after a few months.

  “Hank! What the fuck are you doing!” Behind our backs, Cantare has climbed into the cage with the white-cheeked gibbons and now the whole colony is thrashing.

  The irate ape cries, “Ook ook! Ai ai ai!” He springs off the edge of the stone basin, clawing Cantare across the face and bursting through the door. Andy drags Cantare out of the cage and slams the door shut before before the rest of the gibbons can tear him to bits. He scrambles around the primate area with the flashlight but the manic ape has escaped.

  “I don’t get it. They’re pretty doped up most of the time. It’s in the diet, like anthropoid Prozac.” Andy’s hand is trembling so bad I have to help him dial. He’s never had to make this call, sounding the alarm to bring in the search team. “Otherwise they’d get too depressed about losing the life of the wild.”

  When the head zookeeper answers, Andy starts explaining the situation. He looks like he’s about to faint so I grab the phone. “Charlie? It’s Pally. Andy’s not to blame, okay? Call Umbilico and tell him I said to put out an APB.”

  Chimp-face Charlie.

  Back in the car, Hank holds an ice pack against a gash beneath his right eye and I take a long pull from the flask. Cantare’s a good coagulator, but Andy told him he’d have to see a doctor for a tetanus shot. “That was so fucking stupid, Hank.”

  “All that blocks off the cage is a little piece of plywood, so I just slid it up. If those fuckers are so wild, shouldn’t they have a lock on the pen?”

  “They don’t count on even the world’s biggest fucking bozo trying to climb in during the day.”

  “Shitty little monkey.”

  “Ape.”

  “All right. Shitty fucking ape.”

  “Listen, Hank, you can’t come to the reception looking like this. Give me back the coke. You don’t want that on you in the emergency room.”

  “I don’t have it,” Cantare sniffs.

  “Don’t fuck with me. Give me the fucking coke.”

  “I gave it to the gibbon.”

  “What?”

  “I let him have a taste and he grabbed the rest.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “Took the twenty, too.”

  “You fuckhead! That was almost three grams!”

  “I felt bad about the sideboard.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “It’s a wedding present for my girlfriend. It’s going to go in the dining room. Made in China.”

  “Are you fucking nuts? You don’t give a gibbon coke!”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, the goddamn monkey liked it all right!”

  After putting my shithead director of administration in a cab to the hospital, I have Sanchez drive me over to the Natural History Museum, but the taxidermy convention is strictly stuffed shirts and old birds. “Hey, where’s the formaldehyde?” No booze, just beer and cheap wine. Fuck’em. In five minutes I’m back in the backseat.

  A SHREW with more cleave than buttons on her, flopped teats for his evening feel, harlots for a Saturday, rentals on Friday, and a young stripper as a special delicacy for Sunday, went to account for three-quarte
rs of his sin-come.

  I-69, SATURDAY, 9:00 PM

  On the Eden Street offramp, horns are honking and engines are revving. Herds of limos, some of them buses, flank both shoulders of Adams Ave. Cars are rearing up on each other. It’s Saturday night and all that steel and chrome is hungry for the curves of La Plata. The tires want to feel her road. Fenders want up in her alleys.

  Here are the Darci Brothers—Perry, Onan, and Riley—making asses of themselves again. They’re all dressed as turkeys and lined up on one of their overpriced sectionals. The fat one (by which I mean the fattest one: They’re all fat) raises a knife to carve a cartoon Pilgrim and Indian tied-up and stretched-out on a serving platter, a speech bubble above their heads bearing the marketing cry made out of the Darcis’ first names: “PÉ ÖN RÌ!” Next is Nash Naugayde, rooftop mascot for La Plata Pest Control. Kids look forward to this curve, peering out windows after those big, buggy eyes. When the Red Rat goes by, the child in every grown man goes “Hi.” Here’s one of my own. I look good two stories tall. They airbrushed in a light tan and feathered the edge where the toupee overlaps the ears. Of course I’m a shoe-in for reelection. The city has been renaissanced up the ass, my approval rating is in the high eighties, and the likelihood is I’ll run unopposed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to campaign. Polling shows a little doubt among the Latino community, my bread-andbutter contributors, as to whether I can keep it up another term, so the printed message is simple and direct: “CAN I?… CI!” Fucking numbnuts at Pals for Pally can’t even spell the wetback yes.

  The way my billboard is situated in front of the pitchfork skyline turns me into La Plata’s devilish doorman. Every guy for a hundred-mile radius knows this is the city for flesh exchange and in each one’s filthy little mind I, Mayor Donald “Pally” Dimaio, am the pimping host.

  “Welcome to Pallywood!” There’s a black bowtie on my bare neck and a lecherous grin on my face. “Man, you look like you’ve got it made! Maybe you’re a mobster, or a lawyer who practices his extortion over the table—either way, you’ve come to the right place to blow some ill-gotten gains.”

  All across the city are dirty storefronts with twenty-dollar half-hour massages where The Special is considered an obligatory extra fifty paid in private to the Asian ladies. Most guys are finished in less than five minutes. A halfway-decent, parlor pony ride will run you five bills easy, and then there’s the doctors and crushed-pill pushers rich enough to bring a couple of strippers home or to a hotel for a private hump. A deep-in-debt dentist I know regularly drops ten grand taking three girls back to his office chairs and strapping them in for all-night nitrous parties. He’s trying to cut down to once a month. Here in La Plata we’ve got bachelor-party Disneylands like Heaters and Club Fancies and bottom-shelf establishments like Hunter’s Cabin, the only thirty-dollar room in the smudgy heart of the city, where the hotel lobby happens to open onto an all-night strip club. Lapdance dens like the Velvet Puppet are legal as long as your pants stay on, and if you want to take them off there’s always somebody you can pay who’ll look the other way. The classy act is Crafty Beaver, with its so-called dressing rooms, where it’s a thousand for a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon and it doesn’t even come with a stripper, who’ll run you at least another G, even more for the occasional guest porn star who’ll provide a one-of-a-kind private session for a few moneyed fuckers who know the club password.

  “You with the kite! On your way to boys’ night? How ’bout the Crafty Beaver for a once-in-a-lifetime poke-’er match?”

  What your average Jack won’t dish out for a one-on-one! La Plata is all a guy’s got for three hours in any direction—more, even, with Beantown all button-down-and-butt-plugged and Rudy done to Times Square what those transvestite hookers from Eighth Avenue used to do to him before he got that cherry bomb up his ass. The only other place that’s any fun is the Mashpotato Indian Casino over the state line, and that’s strictly stacked chance for truly strung-out gambling fiends. Unless you go to P-town, in which case you’re a faggot. We’ve got our share of those places too here in La Plata.

  “Step right up! Get your chin up in the sticky stuff!”

  And for the buggerer on a budget, settling into a long, midlife marathon of compulsive pipe-cleaning, there’s everyday-after-work visits to the bank of video booths at Arousing Superstore.

  “A wanker is born every minute! Pick a flick! Pop it in! See what pops up!”

  THE REST of it he laid out on a tabletop as velvet snortings for fiend days, with sniffers to match, while the other days of the week he snorted four figures in a snood of the vinyl soda straw.

  MOUNT GOVERN, SATURDAY, 9:30 PM

  THE flask is almost empty and the dust remaining on the mirror is barely enough to get my gums numb, so I decide to check in on a friend on Assmell Ave. Word in the Old World underworld is there’s a new source in town. “Take me to Mount Govern, Sanchez. Stop at the bank so I can use the ATM.”

  The second my card starts to slip into the slot I notice a frost of white powder on the edge and I snap at the plastic. Too slow! The machine has swallowed and now the screen is asking for my password. I’m thinking cancel! What if the feds have got some kind of dust detectors built into these things and when you pop in your card and it’s got traces on it an automatic signal goes to FBI headquarters and they see if you’re anybody they want to finger? Fuck! Too late now. Two-eight-three-four. Withdrawal. Checking. Three-oh-oh enter. No to your fucking receipt. Two endless seconds go by and I know what the screen is going to say before it says it: Busted. Fuck you and your insufficient funds! I give the security camera the finger and go back to the car.

  “Hey, Sanchez, they’ll make a movie of me someday and you’ll be a character, you know.”

  “Joo tink?”

  “Joo bet. Remember the time we fucked up the guy who fucked my wife? That’ll be a big scene. Who do you want to play you? Some spic hunk? Banderas, maybe?”

  In the rearview, thick eyebrows flicker.

  “Del Toro?”

  Beady eyes widen.

  “Leguizamo?”

  “¿Leguizamo? ¡Carajo!”

  “Okay, Leguizamo it is. Now be a pal, Sanchez, and lend me five bills.”

  “¡Ay, no! Again, jorona?”

  “You know those paychecks you send your Tía Maria in Tijuana? Don’t forget who signs them, kah-brone.” Sanchez pulls out his clip.

  Inside Mer de Tyranno, Franky Moccocco, the owner, greets me at the maitre d’ station. “Hey, Pally!”

  “Hey, Franky!”

  “Pally, I’d like you to meet a frenamine. This is Dylan.” Frenamine means he’s okay, just like in Donnie Brasco. Unlike with Donnie Brasco, frendaours doesn’t mean we’re about to kill him, but it does mean watch what you say because he might be a narc.

  “Hello, Dylan, I’m Pally Dimaio.”

  Dylan holds out a ghostly-white hand, cold to the touch. My friend Franky says, “Dylan is in da dry cleaning bidnis.”

  “I haven’t heard of your business yet, have I, Dylan?” Dylan barely curls his upper lip. Franky ushers us through the kitchen to his back office and I hand Dylan three bills. “Start me off with an eight-ball. Don’t give me any shit. You’re going to sit here while I try it.”

  I’m already so zooted I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell the difference between Bogotá and baby aspirin, but I figure making him wait will guarantee he doesn’t try to pass me three and a half grams of rat poison. Franky unhooks a small mirror from the wall and puts it on the desk. Dylan pulls out a fat little baggie about the size of the last joint of my thumb and pours the contents out on the glass. The pile is pure and luminous, bright as dry bleach. Dylan pulls out a stolen credit card. I catch a peek at the name embossed in green plastic: “JIM FROST.” Chop chop chop. When he’s got a couple of nice lines laid out, Dylan hands me a rolled-up twenty. Snort! Snort! It’s good. Really good.

  “I don’t suppose I have to tell you, Dylan, that it wouldn’t be nice to fla
p your gums to anyone about whose shirts you dry-clean.”

  “I’m a businessman,” says Dylan. “What’s good for business is good for me.” Dylan takes back the twenty. I think he’s going to stick it in his nose for a huff of his own but he just unrolls it and replaces it in his wallet.

  “I thought that was my change.”

  He taps the little pile back inside the baggie and hands me the bindle. Bloodless, Dylan says, “Change?”

  LIVING WITH him were a housekeeper in her forties, a daughter who was not yet thirty, and a lad of the shield-and-jackboot race who handled his car for him and squealed on his screwy ex-wife.

  POTENCY STREET, SATURDAY, 10:15 PM

  Wait for me, Sanchez. I want to go out for a nightcap.” When I get out of the car, Oprah opens the front door. “Hello, O, you fat-assed Jemima in a frilly apron.”

  Oprah sighs, “Po’ Mizzes Mayo.”

  During the divorce, Shirley brainwashed the maid. Oprah is half-deaf and walks around talking to herself about what a scoundrel I am for abandoning poor, helpless Shirley—the bitch fleeced me for half a mil!—but I keep her around because she keeps an eye on my deadbeat daughter and babysits her bastard kid, plus she really knows how to cook up a mess of eggs.

  I bought this place after the break-up and everybody said, “What are you, crazy? Shirley took the girl. You’re a bachelor now. You should live in a condo.” It’s because I had to give Shirley five-hundred grand, and after that there was hardly anything left, but my friends don’t get it: Real estate isn’t real. Think you’ve got a million floating in mortgages? Not really. What’s eight thousand bucks a month? Two grand a week? Two hundred and change a day? No more than a decent hotel. That’s all you have to pay to surround yourself with luxury. And when you’re ready to move, you sell at a profit, so over the years you drop maybe a couple of thou to live like a king, less than the blacks pay to rent in the projects and at the end of the road have nothing to show for it. This place is my divorce present to myself, my rebound pad, my palace. Cathedral ceilings, fireplaces in every room, Jacuzzi in the master bath. Plus the house is right around the corner from Antwerp’s, a yuppie meat market with the choicest cunts.