“Not on your life,” my father said.
Again, my mother tried for the keys. No luck.
Rolling out of the parking lot, my mother lit into my father for driving right past the restaurant’s hand-painted stop sign. “It’s not a real stop sign,” my father said. “It’s an elementary school art project.”
“A stop sign is a stop sign, hand-painted or not. It’s a law.”
And so the volley began, my mother firing one barbed remark after another, each answered with a growl or grunt of dismissal. They went at each other the entire ride home.
Or nearly the entire ride.
We never made it home.
Chapter 30
After the failed Africa job, I made a three-day layover in New York City. Sightseeing, relaxation, and a trip to check out Columbia University was the plan. College seemed more appealing with each passing day. Maybe I could swing a few classes, Kam Manning on the side to cover tuition.
My long weekend turned into a seven-month stay. And in all that time, I never once set foot on campus.
Sarah was the reason.
When I met Sarah at a loft party in Brooklyn, I asked if she spelled her name with an “h” or not.
“Actually, I spell it with two h’s, both silent,” she said.
“Really?”
She smiled, bit the meat of her thumb, then laughed. “No.”
We made out on the fire escape, while across the East River the buildings of lower Manhattan lit up the night sky. I walked her across the Brooklyn Bridge and back to her apartment, as dawn stabbed the city.
Morning. Then the following morning. The entire weekend we tore the sheeting from the bed, leaving each other sore.
I missed my flight, rescheduled, and missed that one too. “You don’t have to leave,” she said, getting ready for work Monday morning. “You can stay.” She shrugged while pulling on her leg warmers. “For a while, at least.”
I was staying at a crusty hotel in Chinatown and had no desire to return. I had nothing calling me back to Seattle, either. Higgles, the Kam Manning, everything was done by text. I had no home, lived in a shitty apartment, no real roots. With its rush of activity and chattering crowds, New York seemed the perfect place to be a stranger. It seemed the perfect place to explore. And the convenience of having a girlfriend with a place was appealing. But convenience always comes with a cost. Living with someone isn’t something to take lightly. It was more than just sharing a sock drawer.
What I liked about Sarah, what made her her, was that she had grown tired of: fun but flaky friends, a sublet on Rivington Street, her job at an art gallery on the Lower East Side. She was bohemian, a pioneer, albeit one spending most of her salary on rent. “I mean, just look at this place,” she’d complain. The five-flight walk-up one bedroom at the back of building never got sunlight. The linoleum flooring curled in the corners and the bathtub emptied sluggishly, taking the afternoon to drain a five-minute morning shower. The oven was barnacle-encrusted with memories of old meals boiled over. And the centerpiece of the small space, Sarah’s gray-sheeted bed, rested against a soot-darkened window.
Still, I liked it. It was welcoming, cozy, a home. More of a home than I’d had, anyway.
Lying in each other’s arms in the morning, she’d spin stories of her pet peeves. “Even the term ‘pet peeve’ is a pet peeve of mine.” So were toe rings, white pantyhose, chunks of apple in white wine, men who spoke with authority on topics they didn’t understand, women who carried their lunch to work in a Victoria’s Secret bag (“What’s that supposed to say, ‘I’m wearing sexy panties while eating my sandwich’?”), and Yorkies that scooted along the dirty sidewalks, rat-brown and yapping sharply. “They’re the dog of my nightmares.”
I told her I hated people who left teabags in the sink. “Is it really so hard to just throw it away?”
She smiled. “You know, I came here thinking New York City was like—I don’t know—a Frank O’Hara poem, I guess. I really thought it’d be the place I’d find myself, that I’d have all this opportunity for excitement and that I’d become this stunning, incredible person. But instead I’ve become something else.” She paused, looking lost. “I think I’ve become my mother.”
Sarah had swept into the city with a liberal arts degree from an overpriced Midwestern college and a hungry ambition. She wanted to be the opposite of everything she’d grown up with. She wanted to be famous, unique, and sought after. But she ended up crowded in a two-bedroom apartment share in Williamsburg with four other Midwesterners who had come to New York wanting the same things. These strangers were identical to her old friends back home—want-to-be artists who made forgettable music, wrote mediocre short stories, painted amateurish paintings.
The only difference was that they were in New York and they were determined to have the time of their lives. After a year, Sarah realized no one was noticing her genius. The city didn’t even notice she was there. Worse, she had a disturbing feeling that her uniqueness was the same as everyone else’s.
Things soured. She no longer liked her friends, especially the one who stole toilet paper from cafés to save money for three-hundred-dollar skirts at the Barney’s Warehouse sale. She no longer liked the constant buzzing activity and was discovering that everything she discovered had been discovered before. Her apartment share had too many roommates moving in or out, too many one-night-stands rolling through, too many hangovers, too many STDs, and too many bedbug scares. So she moved, got a place of her own that she could barely afford. “I wanted less of the bad and more of the better.” But being on her own turned out to be no better.
She was living the life I’d wanted, full of light and sound, but she’d grown tired of it. She talked of leaving the Lower East Side in a year and heading some place quieter, like New Jersey. She wanted more room, more air, more everything.
I wanted more of what we had right now—the hustle of the city, the nightlife, the staying out until dawn. Our conflicting wants made it difficult to build anything on what we had. We unsuccessfully tried to shape each other into the people we desired. It was only after months together, months of being content but not really happy, that I came to realize that we shared little more than a bed. The idea of leaving her, leaving New York, cast a shadow through my thoughts, but I didn’t take action, didn’t initiate my next move. Why I didn’t leave sooner, I can’t really say. I was like a frog in the pot of heating water, comfortable enough to be oblivious to fact that the boiling point was approaching.
My parents had been that way, forcing a fate that shouldn’t have been forced. They weren’t meant to be together, but they got together, stayed together, and made compromises that undermined their happiness.
I didn’t want to follow that same path with Sarah. Yes, I was planning on quitting the Kam Manning, maybe to go back to school or to find a nine-to-five job and settle down to a domestic life. Just not yet.
Chapter 31
Haven, Florida
The car service pulls up to the curb in front of the small two-story building where I live. I pay and climb out into the heat, alone. Any fantasies about spending time with the mysterious woman have evaporated in the hot morning air. She’s gone. It’s probably for the best.
My apartment is upstairs, the entire second floor. On the street level is Silk Cigars, a storefront with a few battered mix-and-match chairs and a display case humidor full of cigars. A shaved-headed Cuban rolls cigars in the window from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., crafting perfect ones each time.
I’ve read it takes ten thousand hours to perfect the art. I’m sure that’s true of pretty much everything. It’s certainly true for lying, something I’ve yet to master.
When I was in the shelter, Ray-Ray told me a story about a sheriff he dated. He was the best liar Ray-Ray had ever known. Consummate. Flawless. They’d been lovers, he and Ray-Ray, even though both men were married at the time.
Whenever they’d meet, at a fishing cabin or a duck blind, they’d plan their future together, talk of running off to Puerto Rico, buying a shack on a deserted beach. But after they’d had their violent go at it, reality would set in. A life together would never work. Buckling his pants, the sheriff would threaten to cuff Ray-Ray, arrest him for sodomy. “That was his sense of humor,” Ray-Ray said. “Anyway, anything he said sounded true. He had a believability to him. When he spoke, you wanted to trust him, even though it was a lie.”
“Whatever happened to him?”
Ray-Ray smiled. “He’s a state senator now.”
Heading to my building’s door, I nod to the old Cuban sitting inside. He lifts his chin toward me, a cigar smoldering in the corner of this mouth.
I’ve been here, in Florida, in this town, this apartment, less than three weeks, yet the pungent stench seeping through my flooring has already stolen five years of my life. My walls are the color of old horse teeth from the smoke.
Until moving here, I never understood the appeal of cigars. I hated the smell, I hate it more now than I ever have. But now I see what the smoke really carries. Downstairs, it’s like an old-school men’s club, a respite from work, wives, and the worries of regular life. The place is a cross section of society. The town mingles. When I pass, I see men in Rolexes bullshitting and bonding with guys in janitor’s scrubs.
A few days ago, feeling hollow from loneliness, I clambered down my steps and went into the shop. I bought a five-inch fifty-ring-gauge Robusto, Dominican filler, Nicaraguan wrapper. I got a V cut, lit it with wood matches, and settled down in a chair with the stuffing coming out. The place was full of men and smoke. The conversation was about diets. It was about stock tips. And about sports, colognes, vacations, cheeses, and auto insurance. It was about everything but women.
I sat for nearly an hour, offering the occasional comment on a football team or politician to the conversation while drawing down my stick of tobacco, taking in everything that was said. I envied the men who hang out there. They have a closeness with each other, friendship. Smoking isn’t about a need for nicotine, it’s an excuse to bond, to be part of something.
Warm with feelings, I was determined to become one of the members, to meet with the gang every day for a laugh and a smoke. I saw myself heading to their homes for weekend barbecues, going out for drinks, maybe even giving golf a try with my new brothers. I would become part of something larger than myself, a member of a group. But then a rush of lightheadedness and nausea from the smoke hit me and I barely made it outside to the gutter before vomiting. I felt sick for the rest of the day.
I open the building’s door and slide into the dimness of the stairwell, my eyes fighting to adjust. A single flight of steps drives straight to my place. Thirty-three total.
Lifting my gaze toward my apartment, my heart vaporizes. Someone is there, sitting on the top stair. Waiting. My legs seize, refuse to function. Shit, I think. Ray-Ray? Higgles? It’s too early for either. Twelve noon is when they’re coming, but then again it’d be just like one of those fuckers to show up three hours early. Then I think, Pockmark. He’s here to kill me.
A voice drifts down, strong but smooth. “Sorry about bolting. I needed to walk a bit.” The woman. Somehow, she’s beat me to my own place. “Plus, I didn’t have money to help pay for the car.”
“How’d you know where I lived?” I ask, knowing the answer before I’ve finished the question. The car service. I told the driver my address. How did you get here so fast? is the question I should ask.
She stands, runs her fingers through her hair. “You’re expecting to see me naked, aren’t you?”
Honesty isn’t always a bad policy. I move up the stairs. “I am.”
“You’re expecting we’ll have sex.”
“It’s crossed my mind.” I reach the top, study her.
Her eyes graph a life of disappointment. She starts to speak but closes her mouth. Her face says it all.
“Let’s just call it a morning,” I say, oddly relieved.
I offer to call her a car service to take her back to the bar.
Her voice is soft, gentle. “Will you come, too?”
“No.”
Standing pigeon-toed, she looks at her hands as if they hold all the answers, then up at me. “Then let’s blunder on,” she says. Her lips find mine.
We fall into a tangle of mouths and tongues, sucking what little oxygen is left out of each other’s lungs.
Pulling free, she says, “Unlock the door.”
Like every place I’ve lived since I left Iowa, my life here is stripped. Pure function and absolute basics. My place could never be mistaken for a home. It’s depressing. No TV, no pictures framed, no knickknacks of my travels. A broken window AC. There’s little comfort. It’s a crash pad at best: scarred hardwood floors, a mattress on the floor, a Formica-topped table, a weathered red recliner, a straight-backed chair, and my library stacked in the corner. Higgles’ books. My amulets. I know each by heart, the titles, the characters, the settings. They remind me of my travels, of all the schemes, of the successes and failures that have built the horror I’m now facing.
Every bit of the past two-plus years is burnt into my brainpan. All the cities, the flights, the street names, the dates, the weather on those dates, the faces and voices of each contact I met, I remember. I even remember the account numbers. I remember everything that has happened to me.
The facts, though, have somehow disassociated themselves with the truth. The details have fragmented, jumbled themselves up. Images of New Jersey come to mind when I think about the raid, but it was in Indiana that that happened. I keep thinking that I got the scar on my head in San Francisco, but it was in Seoul that I took a beatdown. Even with Sarah I’ve grown confused. I’ve thought of her so often that I’m no longer certain which conversations we actually had and which ones are only in my head.
The woman strides in, sniffs at the heavy air. The place is Florida hot, incessantly molding. She sizes up my digs. “Spartan,” she says, idly fingering my copy of The Memphis Sky Above. “Seems like you live on very little.”
I offer her a drink.
She kicks off her heels, revealing dirty feet, then collapses on the tatty red recliner.
“Just a glass of ice water,” she says. “Unless you’ve got gin.”
I do have gin, a new bottle of Randerskin Diamond. A gin made for the royal family of Nepal.
Breaking the cap’s seal, I pour her a double and crack out some stale cubes from the tray. The cubes dink dully together as I hand her the glass.
She takes a swallow, makes a sound of satisfaction. “It’s been a long time since I last had this,” she says, holding her drink up to the light.
“You just had three at Charm’s.”
“I mean this brand,” she says. “I haven’t had it in over ten years.”
“You can tell the brand?”
She holds out the half-empty glass, coy. “I’ll need a bit more just to be sure.”
In the kitchen I refill the glass, bring it back brimming.
She dips her nose over it, sniffs the sticky scent. Then she runs the tip of her tongue over the surface, testing it like a snake, and lifts the glass to morning light. “You must have money or connections,” she says. “Or both.”
The comment chills because it’s true—though not in the way I would hope for. Both the money and connections are tainted. It’s never bothered me before, but then it’s never been something I’ve thought too much about. “Is that so?”
She nods, tilts her glass. “A hint of plum and pine, a good viscosity, the sharp but clean aftertaste. This gin is excellent. And expensive.” She sips the drink. “It’s Randerskin Diamond.”
I’m impressed. “You weren’t kidding. You do know your gin.”
“And I know how to read.” She points to the kitchen. The bottle
sits in plain view. “I can see the label from here.”
◉ ◉ ◉
We’re fired from an unknown gun, shot at a target unseen. Life is making the best of a bad trajectory.
Chapter 32
“Whotta whot!” the man lumbering up the driveway gave Robert Tanke a wave.
Tanke waved back and instantly wished he hadn’t. He had no idea who this man was and had no interest in finding out. He hadn’t been home in over a week. All Tanke wanted to do was get inside his house, kick off his shoes, spoon out some ice cream, and pour himself a tall whiskey. All he wanted was to be left alone.
“Robert—Bobby—I need a favor,” the man said. “If you could—”
“Not interested,” Tanke said, cutting him short. He unlocked his front door and opened it. Who is this guy? How does he know me?
The man grabbed Tanke firmly by the shoulder. “Invite me in, listen to what I have to say.”
“I’ll take a pass,” Tanke said, shrugging his way free. Ducking into his house, he swung the front door closed.
The man’s foot stopped it. “At least let me freshen up a bit,” he said. “I’m pretty ripe from staking out your place for five days straight.” He motioned to a minivan on the street. “Do you know how hard it is to shit into a Taco Bell bag? Nearly impossible not to make a mess.”
“What do you want?” Tanke leaned his body hard to the door.
“Honestly? To fuck with your amigo.”
“My amigo?”
Through the door’s opening, the man smiled. He’d done his research, found a thread, and followed it here. “Think of it like a game of Jenga. You’re a block in an already wobbly tower. It’s time the whole thing falls.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
The man shouldered his way in, knocking Tanke to the floor. “Higgles,” he said, standing over Tanke. “I’m talking about your friend Higgles.”
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