The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  "So soon?"

  "Sometimes," Allison said slowly, with drunken amusement, "things happen faster than you ex-pect them to."

  "What time?"

  "Come round about midnight. I will have sobered up, I promise. I will be in top form. You'll find me very impressive." She wagged a finger at me. "Oh, also."

  "Yes?"

  "Anyone told you that you are a very fine kisser of women?"

  If so, it had been a very long time ago. "You're pretty drunk, Allison. Get some coffee, okay?"

  Before I reached the marble stairs, I looked back at Allison once more. In the darkness of the far booth, she hung her head, perhaps despairingly. Perhaps kissing her had been a mistake. Perhaps I had enjoyed it a great deal and wanted to do it again. And perhaps I would. Then I climbed the stairs, turned the door handle, and eased toward the entrance of the restaurant, hoping no one would see me leave.

  The waitresses sat at a table at the far end of the main dining room, smoking and chatting, and several busboys were involved with sorting silverware and folding napkins. None of them saw me. Yes, no one saw me save one— it was Ha himself, standing in his baggy overalls on a ladder in the foyer replacing a bulb. He saw me exit the Havana Room and he watched me wait to see if the waitresses or busboys had noticed and he saw me look in surprise, up at him, and when our eyes met, he knew everything about me, it seemed, that I was a lonely, unattached man who ate too often at the steakhouse, in some kind of trouble now, and who had just emerged from within the Havana Room, where Allison, a woman he saw every day, sat drunk and alone in the far booth; that something had happened between us in the room. Yes, gazing into Ha's weathered Chinese face, the folded skin, the wide-set, unblinking eyes, I saw he knew these things about me.

  I, on the other hand, knew nothing about him. Especially why it was he who controlled the schedule of the Havana Room's activities.

  * * *

  But I knew something else— I knew that when Robert Moses, the great, bullheaded architect of modern New York, builder of highways and parks and municipal swimming pools, insisted that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway be constructed to facilitate the traffic flowing around New York City to and from the rapidly growing suburbs in Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, the elevated highway was erected through and over the working-class neighborhoods of short brick row homes that used to house the men who serviced the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the docks on the East River. If any thought was given to what would happen to the buildings beneath the highway, it did not change their fate, which was to be subjected to the noise and pollution of the road, the constant shower of hubcaps, empty 10W40 oil cartons, milk shake cups, bags of vomit from carsick children, lost Yankees hats, used diapers, cigarette butts, beer bottles, discarded cassette tapes, condoms, watermelons, radiator caps, and God knows everything else that falls out of or is thrown from cars and trucks. Squatting within the shadows of this rusting, rushing superstructure are businesses that depend upon such a marginal location, where rents are lower, squalor ignored, parking ample and unpoliced: porn shops, taxi garages, car service offices, and so on. It's a bad zone; it was here, for example that a New York City policeman, drinking for twelve hours after his shift ended, some of that time in a strip joint, ran over a pregnant Latina woman and her two children with his van going seventy miles an hour, an event which, for those who believe in such places, sent four souls to heaven and one to the front page of the tabloids. The city has these fissures, deep crevices in the landscape that bad stuff falls into, and it was here that I went looking for Jay that same afternoon, based upon what Allison had told me.

  The building in Red Hook that I wanted sat on Third Avenue. I pushed through the door in a mood of apprehension, because I remembered how much Timothy had liked the place when we'd been there a few years before, and returning now was a measure of my fall since then. But I kept going. The first room, a murky cave of pinball and video games, sold cheap sports memorabilia and junk food. Boys in mismatched Little League uniforms ran pell-mell. I could hear rock music and every few seconds a loud metallic clang. Through a doorway, a much larger room appeared, under this sign:

  35 MPH: All Youngsters Under 9

  45 MPH: Youngsters 9 and Older

  55 MPH: Youngsters 10 and Older

  65 MPH: Youngsters 11 and Older

  75 MPH: Teenagers 13 and Older

  85 MPH: Teenagers 17 and Older

  95 MPH: Special Access, Mgt. Approval Required

  Behind a high curtain of netting, the pitching machines were firing baseballs at the batters. I stood for a moment behind the 45 mph machine as a lanky boy of about ten swung at pitch after pitch with an aluminum bat. The balls seemed pretty fast, but he made contact with every third pitch or so. A middle-aged man in a green Jets cap stepped in and adjusted the boy's stance, the ball whizzing past his eyebrows. Baseball is still sacred in Brooklyn, in a way it never could be on the East Side of Manhattan, and the Red Hook cages are part of a world where forgotten old men sit in lawn chairs in the lumpy fields of public parks, eating unlit cigars and catching smoking rockets from young hurlers, boys whose mothers bleach the uniforms the night before a game, a game often as not umped by a cop or fireman and which, if played at the Ty Cobb Little League field near Avenue X, will be watched not only by the black residents of the housing project across the street and the mothers and fathers sitting on the cement bleachers, but by the men who run the maintenance train of the subway's N line, men who park the massive yellow-and-black engines on the elevated track that directly overlooks right field; on the rare occasion when a boy clanks a ball off the home run wall, one of the men climbs nonchalantly into the cab of the engine and yanks the horn as the boy circles the bases. That's Brooklyn, Brooklyn baseball.

  I moved on. No sign of Jay. A knot of hollering, hot-dog-stuffing boys clustered behind each machine, and the noise was formidable. At the 75 mph cage, I watched one of the boys lean in too close over the plate and take a pitch right on the temple of his batting helmet; his coach reached inside the steel fence, hit the red stop button, and went to pick up his player, who shook off the injury. Of course I thought of Timothy, ten now, quite capable of swinging a bat as hard as many of these kids.

  At the far end of the building lay the 95 mph cage and through the many layers of wire mesh I could see a large figure in T-shirt and shorts taking dramatic cuts at the ball. Others were watching him, and as I approached I realized it was Jay, with something made of green plastic sticking out of his mouth. He clanged an enormous shot. I got closer and saw that the device clenched in his mouth was an inhaler; between pitches he squeezed down on it, shooting whatever chemicals it contained into himself.

  I melted in among the others, worried and fascinated. I knew Jay was a big man, of course, but his body had always been cloaked by a suit or heavy winter coat; here, now, I plainly saw a man about six foot three, two hundred and forty pounds, powerful in the arms and chest and back, with a little extra in the gut, and, most notably, heavily muscled legs that swelled below the knee into enormous, veined calves, large as a comic book superhero's, three times normal size, and oddly, even disturbingly, compelling— beautiful fruits of muscle that splayed widely from the downward line of his legs— legs that Allison had presumably had between her own. Jay and I were not sexual rivals, but we weren't exactly not, either. I wondered if Allison measured our deep but solitary kiss in the Havana Room only a few hours earlier against the ongoing pleasures Jay had provided her. The question was silly but the answer was yes, of course, and seeing Jay's obvious vitality, I thought it was possible that Allison would shrug off our brief intimacy as silly or wrong.

  "Fuckin' freak," sniggered one of the teenage boys hanging their fingers through the wire fencing. "Sucking on that thing, fucking cocaine gas or something."

  "It's brain steroids, like makes your bat speed faster. Major leaguers use them secretly before they come out of the dugout."

  "That's totally fucked, man."

  "N
o it's not! Every major league dugout has like this little bathroom next to it. Guys go in there, toke on that stuff, and come out and hit. Why you think the home run records keep getting broken? It wasn't all the muscle stuff, it was the brain stuff."

  "You have like no fucking idea what you're talking about."

  "Look, he's hitting it, you pussy."

  Indeed he was, and not just dinging them back or popping them up but swinging his bat parallel to the ground and driving the ball straight back against the mesh at the far end, one after another. Then he missed, and the ball rocketed against the screen in front of me. He let out a muffled roar of frustration, then gave himself two shots of the drug, seemingly swelling up with them before the next pitch came.

  Which it did, and Jay got a piece of the ball, clanking it hard against the screen fifteen feet up. He roared again, and slammed the bat into the earth.

  "See?" said the boy, stroking what he hoped was a mustache. "Freakman. Steroids in the brain, making him crazy."

  Jay dug his cleats in and took a practice swing, then pulled the bat back to the loaded position, knees bent, head up, right elbow high and a little jumpy. The mechanical arm lifted and Jay rocked and cocked, as the coaches say, and when the ball came he was ready and drilled it into the nets.

  "Haaa!" came his cry of satisfaction. The sound was sexual, murderous.

  "See?" announced one of the boys. "See that?"

  "I see your momma."

  "Your momma fucked my baseball bat."

  "Yeah, the one your sister gave her after she was done with it."

  "You mean the one you licked for three hours."

  "Shut up," said a third boy, "he's switch-hitting."

  I watched Jay shift from rightie to leftie and swing at another forty pitches or so. Batting from the left, he wasn't nearly as effective, and missed every other pitch. But of course being able to switch-hit well is one of the rarest of skills in baseball, and I was intrigued that he was even trying it, especially with balls coming at major league speed. The back of his shirt grew dark between the shoulder blades, then a red light on the pitching machine popped on, signaling the end of the session.

  "No good," Jay snarled to himself. He spat the inhaler out of his mouth, flipping it up in the air before him, and swung at it with the bat. It shattered and its metal canister flew in our direction, skittering over the dirt.

  "He always does that, too," said one of the boys, "that's how come I know it's brain steroids."

  Jay pushed up his helmet and started to pull off his batting gloves. I slipped back a step, thinking that it might not be right to confront him there, before so many people, while he held a baseball bat and was under the effects of whatever drug he'd been inhaling.

  "Yo, mister," cried one of the boys. "What you got in that thing?"

  "I'm finding out," said the other boy, and he scampered into the cage. Jay watched him with disinterest. The boy scooped up the canister from the dirt and ran back.

  "What is it?"

  The boys studied the fine print and I edged closer for my own look.

  "Ad-ren-o-something."

  "Let me see that, you fucking illiterate."

  "Hey, yo mister," one of the boys hooted.

  A heavyset man in his twenties in a Rangers jersey suddenly appeared, bent low to the boy, and spoke harshly to him, glancing up at Jay now and then.

  "Okay, okay," the boy protested. Then he and the other boys ran off with their prize.

  Adrenaline. In aerosol form. Did it really help one's bat speed? The idea made a kind of crazy sense. Jay opened the cage door and lurched forward through the crowd, his Yankees cap down low over his forehead, a coat and sweatpants slung over his shoulder, eyes on the ground, his face angry and determined and oblivious to all, including me. I made sure he couldn't see me, intimidated by his staggering, violent strength, no doubt enhanced by the stuff he'd pumped into his system. He also appeared deeply alone, threatening in his bulk. My planned declarations seemed puny and even imbecile, but I decided to press forward, and followed him from thirty feet back as he disappeared into the front room, saying goodbye to no one, though it had seemed from the boy's comments that Jay was well known there. I fought through a sudden influx of eight-year-old boys, any of whom could have been Timothy a couple of years earlier, and watched Jay plunge out the front door into the cold. When I reached the door he had already crossed the three southbound lanes of Third Avenue and disappeared under the deep shadowed roar of the expressway. Across the street a neon sign promised XXX VIDEOS & BUDDY BOOTHS. I'd missed him again, or rather had found him and then let him go. Impossible, impossibly stupid. Or was I just scared of him? Was letting him go smarter?

  "Jay!" I called, trying to lift my voice over the river of heavy traffic before me. I stepped into the street, waiting for an opening.

  "Yo, man," called a hoarse voice next to me. "Don't mess with that dude."

  A face emerged from the doorway behind me, a man a few years younger, his hair brilloed around his head. He might have been white, dressed Latino, talking black. It gets harder and harder to tell these days. I turned back toward Jay, then checked the light.

  "Why?" I answered, still watching. "Why shouldn't I mess with him?"

  Through the traffic I could see Jay getting into his truck.

  "That guy? Lemme tell you about that guy, okay? He's no good. I mean it."

  "Come on."

  The cab darkened, the headlights went on.

  "Jay!" I called again, stepping forward.

  "Do I look like I'm messing with you?" the man said.

  I watched the traffic slow. "Jay! Jay!"

  His truck bumped its way onto the other side of the avenue, heading north, toward Manhattan.

  "I'm telling you, don't fuck with him!" He jerked his thumb toward the batting cages. "Fucking gorilla, they ought to throw him out of there. Sucking on drugs, scaring those kids. Shit fucks you up, makes you crazy. The polices, they don't do shit, neither."

  "What, what?"

  "That guy, he's done some stuff, okay? Let's just leave it at that. You ain't from around here, okay? I would of seen you before." The man bobbed his head assertively, as if I had argued the point. "One time some guy got into a argument with him, and it wasn't pretty. You know what I'm saying?" He stepped forward, grabbed my coat, yanked. Instinctively I stepped backward but it was too late. His face was close to mine, breath warmly foul. "Just like that, huh? Like pulling down the fucking zipper on your coat, ha!"

  This seemed unlikely to me. Street rumor, false legend. But I was scared anyway. "How often does he come here?"

  "All the time, anytime. Maybe like three times a week."

  So he probably lived nearby, I thought. "You know anybody wants to make any money?"

  He looked at me like I had a dead fish hanging out of my mouth. "What're you talking about?"

  I said, "You heard me."

  "Tell me that again?"

  "I'm saying I'll pay a hundred bucks to know where he lives. Somebody could watch for him, follow him home."

  "Come on, what the fuck." He pulled a galvanized roofing nail out of his pocket and began to suck on it.

  I wrote down my new phone number. "Here's what the guy does. He follows that guy home. By car, whatever. Doesn't do anything. Nothing. No talking, nothing. Just the address. Then he calls this number"— I handed him the slip—"and leaves the address. Then he tells me how he wants to be paid. I'll come right back out here, if necessary."

  "Come on, you kidding me with that shit."

  "You're right," I said. "I am. I'm kidding."

  The nail bobbed up and down. "Hundred's not much."

  "I'll pay three hundred."

  "Get out of here, three hundred?"

  "Sure. What's your name?"

  "Everyone call me Helmo." He smiled with sly pride. "You know, the hair and all."

  I nodded. "Okay, Helmo."

  "Who are you?"

  "Who cares who I am?"

 
; Helmo made scissor fingers and took the slip of paper from me. "Yeah, who cares?"

  * * *

  There was at least a chance that Jay had driven to his new building, so I got off the train at the City Hall stop and walked down Reade Street, past the Mexican guys cutting flowers in the Korean delis, past the delivery trucks and battered cabs. When I got to the building I looked for Jay's truck. Nothing. But a couple of windows were lit in the building. I rang the various doorbells until someone buzzed the main door. Inside I saw new menus and fliers on the floor, as well as a garbage can filled with plaster bits, lathing, trash. Had Jay already started some renovation? The more I thought about him, the stranger he seemed. He'd just bought a three-million-dollar building and here he was whacking baseballs in Brooklyn? A guy with a girlfriend named O and who attended basketball games at a private girls' school? I checked the door to the basement, which was locked, then headed up the high, steep stairs, hoping Jay might somehow be in one of the offices, still in his sweaty baseball clothes. I knocked on the various doors but got no response.