by Jeff Johnson
I waved at Flaco as I passed on the walk down to “mitri’s izza.” Above the fabled headquarters/pizzeria of my landlord were three floors of apartments, and some of them were occupied. The D and the P on the neon sign in the window had burned out years ago, so it had read “mitri’s izza” for as long as anyone could remember. He claimed to have done it on purpose, and sadly he may have. The windows were filmed with years of accumulated soot and grease and the front door needed a new coat of paint a decade ago. I pushed the door open and a little bell tinkled.
Dmitri was slouched behind the counter next to his ancient push button cash register, staring without visible interest at a crossword puzzle. He wasn’t holding a pen. There were three slices of pizza in the heated glass cabinet next to him, two red-slicked pepperoni and a dried-out cheese that looked a few days old. The sticky Formica tables were empty. A few of them boasted paper plates with petrified crusts and hanks of napkins. It was anyone’s guess as to how long they’d been there.
“Lucky boy,” Dmitri murmured, looking up. His eyes were dark and glassy, the whites yellowed with morning booze and weeks of bad food, all on top of nights of no sleep and bouts of hysteria. His giant oily wigwam of curly gray hair was listing off to one side. He was wearing a red and black checkered polyester coat and lime-green pants, and the overall impression was that of a small-town rodeo clown too fucked up to find his face paint. “I been lookin’ for you. Where you been?”
“California,” I replied. Dmitri pointed at the pizza case with a long gray finger and I shook my head. “So what’s up, man? How you doing?”
Dmitri sighed and looked out the grimy windows, a lost, pitiful look on his face. I waited.
“Oh, you know,” he said finally. “I don’t have good dreams anymore, Darby. I never did, but now I don’t even sleep.”
I pulled up a stool and sat.
“Tell me about it,” I said. He focused on me and gave me a sad, boyish frown.
“The world is changing, Darby, and I’m too old to change with it.” He shook his head and gave me the expressive two-handed Greek shrug. “Old Town is going to be New Town in a few years. Maybe sooner. Have you noticed what’s going on?”
It had never occurred to me to wonder how gentrification looked from Dmitri’s point of view. His childhood had its roots here. He’d been brought up in Old Town, back when it was simply the immigrant section. He’d even fucked Monique more than a few times, I knew, so his experiences were current. “Has someone been leaning on you, Dmitri?”
“Nah.” He waved the idea away like a bad smell. I’d never seen a gesture so filled with lies. The new landlord class had been pouring in like piranhas all around his hemorrhaging idiocy. “The city wants to give me a zero-interest loan to ‘upgrade.’” He said the last with something close to a snarl. I sat back and zeroed in on an old, cluttered fly strip dangling behind him. I was beginning to get a glimpse of the bigger picture.
The fastest way to get Dmitri to throw an awesome, Chimpanzee-style tantrum was to report that something was broken in one of his buildings. As tenants, we’d all learned that long ago. If a toilet broke, you fixed it and said nothing. Same with a broken heater, a leak in the roof, electrical problems, basically everything. It didn’t matter that most of the pipes in the building that housed the Lucky were over sixty years old and the roof had never been replaced, that the wiring had been chewed on by generations of rats and was probably substandard to begin with.
Dmitri took all those things personally in a very weird way. If some part of the building broke that it was technically his responsibility to maintain, he would fly into an inhuman rage when confronted with it, because in his mind it meant you were accusing him or his departed father Foti of putting low-grade ghetto junk into the building in the first place, that he was too stupid to know what was built to last, and finally that a toilet distributor or a bent window man had ripped him off thirty years ago because he was gullible.
It didn’t matter that his buildings were actually falling apart, that everything was held together with layers of crazy glue and bent screws and the amateur repairs of the occupants. Having the city point it out to Dmitri had aged him visibly, I realized. It was eating him alive from the inside, like he’d finally swallowed a bat bug hive that had been breeding on his breakfast table his entire life.
Dmitri desperately needed me to lie to him. So of course I did.
“Fuck those assholes,” I said. “Why does everything have to be new and plastic? You know something these buildings have that no prefab mini mall ever will? Style. Old World charm.”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Dmitri said, perking up a little, his eyes widening.
“It’s the difference between a beat-up hood rat with a nasty pussy rash and an elegant lady with a bottle of fine champagne,” I continued. Dmitri slammed his hand down on the counter.
“Exactly!” he roared.
I had to be careful not to overdo it. If I got him too stoked up, he was liable to do something reckless, like march over to City Hall and freak out, maybe even take his green golf pants off and wave them around like the flag of Atlantis. His underwear alone would bring the wrath of God down on all of us.
“Just ignore ’em,” I advised, slyly moving to a different tactic. If I could get him to roll out his condescending wise man routine, it would make him feel satisfied that he’d made his case, even though I ultimately viewed all of his opinions as horseshit and he knew it. It had worked before. He just needed to vent. “They’ll come around once they understand the concept of architectural character.”
Dmitri narrowed his eyes at me, rising to the occasion, even though he knew what I was doing. He sighed in a maudlin way as a prelude.
“Darby, I will tell you something about yourself, and you should listen. You aren’t a smart man. Don’t be insulted. Just don’t bother. I’m already tired.” His face firmed up and then went slack. His eyes took on a profound distance. It was working.
“You, your little Delia, poor, doomed Gomez, the Cho Family Circus, all of you are outsiders. Almost everyone in Old Town is. It’s why you’re all here in the first place.” He paused to dump some white wine into a paper cup from a half-gallon jug. He didn’t offer me any, so I couldn’t refuse. After a big gulp and a vaudeville flourish he continued.
“As spectators of the admittedly obscure state of social affairs, you’re far more lost in your opinions than most people, which is why I pointed out your intellect. You personally bear two crosses, Darby.”
I shifted, but said nothing. It was imperative to keep him flowing until the tap went dry. He confused my attention for tacit agreement. I suppressed a smile, which would have only confused him.
“The landlord class, well, we are different. We have a responsibility to a greater cause, a cause that imbues us all with a heightened clarity. We are all akin to spiritual miniature mayors in that way.”
“Spiritual miniature mayors,” I repeated.
“Council members, with a charter that defies description. It’s much more than a birthright or a lifestyle choice. It is a destiny.”
“Destiny …” I breathed it.
“Correct. This change? This change occurs in every aspect of the social body. Psychology? Sociology? Those are infant French pseudosciences engineered to comfort the masses. The only accurate mechanism for understanding our fellow man is economics. Numbers don’t lie, and as a species we generate them by the trillions, individually and collectively.”
“I see.” I did, unfortunately. It was horribly cynical to the point of being partly blind, but I did see. Change in the tattoo world was driven by numbers these days. Dong-ju with a tattoo shop in a mall, a rich weirdo so entitled that the whole Norton affair wasn’t theft so much as an investment decision. Money had driven the art in the beginning, and then the art had driven itself for a while, until the blossoming of a period of robust development had, naturally, attracted people interested primarily in money.
“Now conside
r,” Dmitri continued patiently. “I am like a zoo keeper. You are all my animals. So it’s like a carnival, or a game preserve. The new landlords are corporations, and they behave like prison wardens. The numbers will bear me out.”
“A spiritual miniature mayoral zookeeper,” I said, putting it all together.
“Don’t mock me,” he scolded with an indulgent, professorial smile. I held up my hands.
“The wardens don’t like outsiders. You represent a variable in their tidy equation. They actually don’t like me either, but for entirely different reasons …” He trailed off.
I couldn’t stand another minute of it, so when it looked like his meditative state of self-doubt was going to hold I stood up, mission accomplished. It was an improvement from drunk and cornered. His thoughts had been organized. I took my wallet out and nodded at the pizza rack. “Gimme a slice of that pepperoni to go.”
“You got it,” he said. A measure of life and enthusiasm had flowed back into Dmitri for the moment, but just enough for him to work on a solid buzz and a nap. He used a crusty spatula to slide the greasy slice onto a paper plate and beamed Buddha at me. I flicked three bucks out on the counter, and he rang up the sale on the cash register as I walked out.
I went straight to Gomez’s bar, dumping the pizza slice into a bus stop trashcan as I passed. The inside of the Rooster Rocket was dark and mostly empty at that hour. Gomez was wiping down the taps and talking to the new waitress.
“Darby,” he called. “Christian thimble or a real one?”
“Vodka rocks,” I replied, “and pour one for yourself, my treat. I just talked to Dmitri.”
Gomez raised an eyebrow and then tossed his head at the booth all the way in the back. I crashed into the old Naugahyde bench on one side of it and lit up a cigarette. A minute later he joined me with two glasses.
“What did he say?” Gomez asked, and then raised his hand. “Wait!” He picked up his glass and drained half of it, sucked at his black moustache. “Okay. Now I’m ready for anything.”
“The city has apparently been hassling Dmitri about the state of his buildings. They went so far as to offer him an interest-free loan to upgrade. And I get the feeling that the new real estate moguls buying up everything around us might be leaning on him to sell and the city is their way of depleting his resources to make him desperate. He’s pretty much freestyling on the outer edge of sanity at this point. Described himself as a spiritual mini mayor with a destiny.”
Gomez’s eyes went wide and he leaned back, then forward again to hunch over his drink. “Well,” he said, with strange Mexican calm. “We appear to be fucked, my friend.”
“Yep. You know how that crazy fucker gets. He’s not going to take the loan or fix anything, that goes without saying. It won’t be long before we get visitors of our own. City visitors. Inspectors. And they’re going to be extra nosy.”
Gomez gulped down the rest of his drink and reached out for mine. I slapped his hand away and picked up my glass.
“Madre de Dios,” he said softly. “They’ll bypass Dmitri and fuck with us directly. When was your last fire inspection?”
“Last year. I derailed the guy by talking about boxing. No way we would pass.”
“I did the same thing. Fishing, which I know nothing about. Liability insurance?”
“Up to date. I’m wondering about electrical codes and that kind of thing. When Wally owned the place, he made the most utterly half-assed repairs imaginable, and of course he didn’t pay for them, so I don’t even have the names of the repair people to find out who did what. I’m probably supposed to hide from them anyway. It’s that fucked. One building inspector would sink me.”
Gomez’s eyes went blank as he conducted a mental inventory of everything he’d done to his bar over the last fifteen years. When he was done he shuddered. “What the hell are we going to do? Did you tell the old lady at the mini-mart?”
“You tell her,” I said. “Maybe try sign language.” I gunned my drink. “I have no idea what to do. Only thing I can think of is to clean up the front of our places. Maybe sneak over to Dmitri’s at night and wash the windows and paint the fucking door, fix his idiot pizza sign.”
“Right … a little paint, sweep the sidewalks. That’ll hold ’em off for a few minutes.”
I sat there thinking. Gomez was silent as well, staring at his big hands.
“So you said your lease is up in five years?” he asked finally.
“Four years and change,” I replied. “I just re-signed less than a year ago.”
Gomez shook his head. “We must have rights of some kind. I’ll look into it.”
“Good idea. I’ve got some customers who’re contractors. Maybe I can convince one of them to come down and give the building a once-over on the down-low, just to give us an idea how bad it is.”
“Right. Good. What was up with the cops at your place last night?”
I shrugged. “Some asshole pulled a knife on me, so I spent the night in jail getting interrogated.”
“Again?” He looked surprised and amused.
“C’mon, Gomez. I get enough shit from Delia.”
“I haven’t been to county in almost a year,” he bragged.
“I remember. I was in the fucking Federal Building, which brings me to one more thing. Personal.”
“We need another round.”
“Don’t look so glum, but it is bad news. The Lucky has another problem. I do.”
Gomez switched gears from aging Mexican bar owner to the other Gomez, the seventies East LA cholo who left with his girlfriend when she got pregnant. I never knew what he did in those years, other than from the brief snatches of the stories I overheard at the Gomez family picnics, and from the way his face could go from hard to diamond. The old gangster was on line behind his eyes.
“You can tell me anything, Darby,” he said in a low voice. “My guns are yours.”
“Thanks, brother. I might need ’em. That kid Bling who worked for me?” Gomez nodded. “He stirred up some shit in the form of a rich guy named Dong-ju. So we’re on red alert. He’s out of San Francisco.”
Gomez looked down at his glass, then raised his hand and gestured at the new waitress for another round. When he looked back at me his eyes were black holes in his head.
“San Francisco … I know people in LA. People who are in … you know, crisis management. They have cars, but traveling is very, very hard for them.”
“I can dig it. For right now, anyone asking the wrong kind of questions, that kind of thing?”
“I’ll keep ’em here in the bathroom until you sort them out.” He smiled, but his eyes stayed the same. I nodded.
The drinks arrived and we sipped them in silence. Eventually I clapped my hands together.
“I’m out of here. Thanks on the extra eyes. Call me on my cell if Dmitri flips out, or tell Delia. And call me the minute you hear anything about the lease rights, but let’s keep this to ourselves for now. Things are tense at the shop already.”
Gomez silently gestured at me with his glass, then to himself. His eyes went to the new girl and the rest of the bar. Silence for his people too.
I walked next door to the Lucky Supreme and found Nigel prowling the lobby. He looked away from the windows at me with a carefully neutral expression, which betrayed an inner landscape of alarm and the immediate potential for violence. Everyone was talking with their face and it was all bad news.
“You’re early,” I said. It was a little after four.
“Alex had to go pick up his kid,” he replied sourly. “Or so he says. Dwight went with him.” He looked out the windows again and gestured with his head. “Check out that ride.”
I followed his gaze. A maroon Oldsmobile was parked across the street. The windows were tinted, but I could make out the silhouettes of two figures inside. Great big ones.
“Alex said they’ve been there too long. Freaked him out. Dwight was hanging with him. Those two chickenshits know something is going down and
they aren’t stepping up.”
“Hm.”
It was Monday, so Nigel would be working alone until Mikey showed up just before closing. I had forbidden guns in the shop, but everyone was breaking the rules. I couldn’t blame them.
“Think they’re feds?” I asked. Nigel looked at me like I was insane.
“In an Olds?”
“Right. Keep an eye on ’em.”
I went into the back and sat down at my desk. Bling’s box of cash had arrived and it was sitting in the center of my desk. I put it in the bottom of one of the filing cabinets. After a moment I opened the top desk drawer and rummaged around until I found the matchbook with Monique’s phone number inside. She picked up on the first ring.
“Hey baby,” she purred.
“It’s Darby.”
“Damn!” She was instantly furious. “Thought you might be a man with money and a load. Nobody calls this fuckin’ phone for pussy anymore. Always some other shit. Monique you late, Monique gimme the money, Monique where my fuckin’ wig. I don’t even know why I bother to answer this fuckin’ thing.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Hangin’ out front of Murray’s up on Twelfth. Got me an ice tea. Cold as fuck out here, don’t know what the fuck I was thinkin’. I tell you what though, I scratch up that ’Bama cunt’s eye last night, sure as fuck did. The pink boot bitch. Dumbass Okie—”
“Monique,” I interrupted. “I want you to do something for me.”
“’Bout damn time,” she replied. “I’s figurin’ you for queer.”
“No no. There’s a maroon Olds parked across from the Lucky. I need you to scope them out. They might be feds, might be the scumbags I was looking for. So be careful. It’s what we talked about. Call me as soon as you’re done, but don’t come in the shop.”
“Cost you twenty bucks, white boy. I get in trouble you come out and help my ass, hear? I’m talkin’ guns blazin’.”
“I’ll be watching,” I replied. “So will Nigel. Just don’t get in the car.”