Florida straits kwm-1

by Laurence Shames

  After twenty minutes or so, a tall redhead came sashaying down the street. Her wig was done up in a modified beehive, her short skirt followed the curve of her hips like the skin on a banana, and her big earrings glinted under the streetlamps. There was professionalism and even grandeur in her slightly knock-kneed gait. Joey approached her.

  "Wanna party, handsome?" she asked him. The voice was breathy and suitably lewd, and it issued forth from a full, bowed mouth to which a purplish lipstick had been applied with a surprising degree of measure and restraint.

  "I wanna talk," said Joey. "Buy you a drink?"

  "For starters," cooed the hooker. She had a beauty mark stenciled onto her right cheek, and her eyebrows were tweezed into a steep arc that suggested constant astonishment.

  "Where do you like?"

  By way of answer, she took Joey's elbow and led him down Duval Street. They walked in silence for a block and a half, and Joey tried not to notice that he was greatly enjoying the rub of her bust against his arm. She was wearing a magenta brocade blouse that fit like a corset and gave her a cleavage like a baby's ass. Also, she smelled good; her perfume was citrusy and clean. She had style, Joey decided. And poise. In New York she'd be at least a two-hundred-dollar piece.

  She maneuvered him into a place called Workingman's Tropic. Dim, without music, it was not a tourist joint. At one end, two guys were shooting pool in a golden cone of light. The bar itself was dark wood bristling with beer spigots. Here and there, unkempt ferns dangled from the ceiling. Joey and the hooker sat down at a wicker table, under a plant. Leaves trailed down and tickled Joey's neck.

  A waiter came over and the hooker ordered a Kir Royale. Joey asked for a scotch.

  "You have great-color eyes," she said to him, clinking glasses. "Almost like Liz Taylor. I've always thought bedroom eyes should be dark brown. But that dreamy violet-I'll have to reconsider." She lapped her drink. "So what would you like to talk about?"

  "I wanna talk about what you do."

  She scanned his face for a moment, and then a look of deep concern crossed her features. Poor puppy, the look said. Can't function? Just want to hear? Then the kind look was replaced by a mock scolding one and accompanied by a wag of the finger. "I never tell tales on other clients," she said.

  "No, no, no," said Joey. "You don't understand. I don't mean what you do, I mean how you do it."

  The hooker giggled, rounded her shoulders to show off her collarbones, and managed a serpentine squirm in her chair. "That's an art, baby. That's not something that can be explained over one drink."

  Joey took the hand that was cold from holding his glass and ran it through his hair. "Look… what's your name?"

  "Vicki," said the hooker, managing to make the word sound like some forbidden body part.

  "Look, Vicki, we don't seem to be connecting here. What I'm talking about is the business side. You see?"

  Vicki's mouth came out of its bowed smile, collapsed for a moment into a confused pout, then hardened to a thin line; her tweezed eyebrows fell from their inquisitive arc to parallel the narrowed lips. "No," she said, "I don't see."

  At that moment there came an unfortunate ebb in the noise level of the bar, and when Joey spoke again it seemed as if he was addressing the room at large.

  "What I'm asking," he said, "to put it simply, is, well, do you have, you know, a pimp?"

  "A pimp?" said Vicki, not softly.

  The pool players put down their cues. Guys at the bar pricked up their ears.

  "A pimp? What're you, crazy? You little piece of shit, what do you think I am? You think I'm a common whore, you little limp-dick shitass?"

  Joey reached a conciliatory hand toward Vicki's wrist, but she yanked her arm away. Then she stood up, knocking over her chair and spilling the remains of her Kir. "I'm an artist, you little scumbag. You heartless, gutless, sexless… oh sweet Jesus, how I hate people like you."

  A thick blue vein was standing out on Vicki's neck, and her lips were quivering in the effort to shape more words. None came, only a ferocious exhalation that seemed to rattle her teeth. Finally, with a green flame of loathing in her eyes, she reached into her blouse, pulled out a tit, and threw it at Joey. It was made of hard rubber, and it hurt his ribs as it bounced off them. The tit landed on the table, wobbled a moment like a twirled coin, and came to rest nipple side up. The red-tinted nub stared at Joey like a blind but accusing eye.

  " Marrone," he said.

  The bouncer had arrived. He had a shaved head that was a smaller outcropping of his neck, a single sapphire earring, and he cleaved to the notion that the regular customer was always right and the firsttime visitor always wrong. He lifted Joey out of his chair with such deftness that Joey almost didn't notice he'd been levitated.

  "Hey, bubba," he said, casting a sad glance at the ersatz bosom on the table, "can't you see you're upsetting the lady?" His face was close to Joey's and his breath smelled of nachos.

  "Little misunderstanding is all," said Joey. His arms were pinned to his sides.

  "It happens," said the bouncer, and he gave Joey a sympathetic squeeze that made him burp up some scotch. "So why don't you just apologize, then go away and never come back."

  Joey looked across the table at Vicki, half of whose bosom was still heaving with rage. Apologize? Apologize in public? Apologize in public to a transvestite whore? He, the son, albeit illegitimate, of Vincente Delgatto? In New York this would never happen. But this was not New York, and it had gotten through to Joey that not one person in Workingman's Tropic was on his side. In a flash of pained and utter befuddlement, he was not even sure that he was on his side. "I'm sorry, Vicki," he managed to say.

  The bouncer eased his grip and Joey filled his lungs.

  Vicki straightened her wig, stuck out her chin, and mustered as much dignity as her empty bra cup allowed. "I accept," she said regally. "But only because you've got such pretty eyes. You little douchebag."

  — 7 -

  So all in all, it had not been going well for Joey, and as he sat poolside in his shaving robe and sunglasses, he pondered the narrowing range of his options. The bitch of it was that at every moment it seemed to him that he was very close to getting something started. All it took was for the first piece of the puzzle to fall into place. An income opportunity- any income opportunity-would allow him to go out and hire some muscle, and he'd be set. Or if he could somehow get some muscle behind him, the income opportunities would create themselves.

  But how did you start? And how low could you go? Already Joey had faked car trouble on U.S. 1 so he could flag down a supermarket truck and propose to the driver that maybe a few hundred pounds of sirloin steak should fall out the back; the teamster had answered by producing a crowbar from under the driver's seat. Next, Joey had casually broached the question of insurance with the proprietor of a local surf-and-turf emporium; the restaurateur said he would check his policy and came back from the kitchen whispering to a pair of slathering Dobermans with stud collars. No one in Key West seemed the slightest bit afraid of Joey, and he found this disconcerting. It made him secretly suspect that even in New York no one had been afraid of him, only of the yeggs he ran with.

  "Sandra," he asked one night in bed, "do you think I'm like, what's the word, intimidating?"

  Sandra Dugan was not a woman of wide sexual experience, but the most basic of intuitions told her that if you cared about a guy, you didn't giggle at him when you were between the sheets. Instead, she seriously appraised his face. It was boyish, no getting around it. The blue eyes were lacking in threat, the half-curly hair was lamblike in spite of Joey's efforts to keep it slick and tough. Only the cleft in the chin suggested the possibility of violence, and the cleft in the chin was barely visible. "No, Joey," she said, "I wouldn't call you intimidating." Then, to soften the blow, she asked a somewhat disingenuous question. "But why would you wanna be?"

  Joey measured his need to talk against the tenets of his code. He couldn't say he wanted to look scary so he could
shake guys down. "Ya know," he said, "just so I could, like, persuade people to do things for me."

  "People do what they want," said Sandra. "You want people to do things for you, Joey, you have to make them want to."

  But what Joey wanted was for people to hand him large amounts of cash. This didn't happen by making nice. It happened by… well, Joey was close to admitting he didn't know how it happened. And in the meantime here he was, snuggled up in the sack, helplessly going broke. In the meantime he was feeling more guilty every day that Sandra was earning and he was not. No, he had to keep pushing.

  But why? Where was the justice in it, the sense? Joey thought about Steve. He didn't push. All he did was stand bare-assed in the pool all day. And, unlikely as it seemed, Steve was in his quiet way a big shot. He owned the compound. He was a landlord in a town where rents were through the roof. How had it happened? Did he start off rich, or once do something very smart? Joey had to admit he didn't have a clue how most people made their livings, couldn't figure the logic that made the legitimate world keep turning. If he could figure it out… well, hell, he had his own angles to worry about.

  And there were plenty of them he hadn't looked into yet. There was bed linen for the hotels and table linen for the restaurants. There was construction, union or otherwise. There was garbage. He just had to keep up his initiative. He'd get some sleep, drink some coffee, catch some sun; then, when he was feeling rested and looking prosperous, he'd drag his desperate ass downtown and try again.

  –

  Cliff, the daytime bartender at the Eclipse Saloon, smiled weakly and stifled a yawn. This was the sleepy time, coming up on four p.m. The lunch rush was over, the waitresses were smoking and yakking across the empty dining room as they filled the ketchup bottles and topped off the saltshakers for dinner. The bar was vacant except for a couple of lushes who'd been there since breakfast and the occasional regular who stopped by for one pop and some air-conditioning. Late afternoon was also when the dullest strangers wandered in, baffled tourists traveling alone, salesmen who needed a quick belt before opening the swatch book one more time. They always wanted to talk, these solitary ones. They talked about ex-wives, their time in the navy, the clogs in their fuel injectors. They talked about autumn in New England, winter in the Rockies, springtime in Amarillo, about everyplace they ever remembered being happy, but not happy enough to stay there. Now here was a guy who wanted to talk about garbage.

  "So how does it work down here?" Joey asked, nursing his tequila. "Is it city, or private, or what?"

  "You pay the city," said Cliff, "and the city contracts it out."

  "Ah," said Joey. Cliff didn't want to sound bored, and Joey didn't want to sound disappointed. But if garbage money went right to the town, hell, that was like socialism. How could you slam if the cheeks got mailed straight to city hall, if there were no private carters to squeeze? It killed initiative. "And there's no one who's, like, independent?"

  The bartender caught himself yawning and pretended instead to be swallowing a sneeze. "I think the problem is using the dump. We've got this huge land-fill here. People call it Mount Trashmore…"

  Across the U-shaped bar, a white-haired gent was gesturing for a cocktail, and Cliff took the opportunity to escape.

  In a moment he returned, and his manner toward Joey had become just slightly deferential. "Bert would like to buy you a drink," he said, nodding toward the old man. "And if you have a minute, he'd like to talk with you."

  Now, the Eclipse Saloon was a serious drinking establishment, the edge of whose bar was heavily padded with vinyl-covered foam rubber so customers could rest their elbows or their heads for long periods of time. Joey suddenly felt his arms sinking helplessly deeper into the upholstery, and he realized that his strength was being sapped by an idiotic gratitude that had put a lump in his throat. For weeks he'd been pushing, pushing, pushing. He'd thrust himself on people, taken the lead in every encounter. Everybody had either shied away or been ready to fight. This-O.K., it was a tiny thing, a free drink, but except for the occasional cup of herb tea, it was absolutely the first time in Florida that anyone had done anything for him.

  He nodded a thank-you and the old gent waved him over.

  He had white hair that in recent years had taken on a tinge of bronzy yellow, yellow like the color of nicotine. He was lean and tall, but with the stretched-out droop of someone who used to be taller. His eyes were black, deep-set, and just a little too close together around a bent and monumental nose.

  "Hello, Joey," he said. "Siddown."

  The recognition should have made him very edgy, but Joey was so hard up for company that he barely let himself be bothered. "How you know my name?"

  "This is a small town, Joey. Guy shows up, drives around in an El D with a New York tag, starts asking about bolita, starts talking to truckers, it gets noticed, people talk. And me, I'm a guy people talk to. No particular reason. Except I'm around, I'm available, I listen."

  There was something strange about Bert's voice, something that Joey could not immediately place. Then he realized what it was. Bert sounded normal to him. "You from New York?"

  "Yeah. Brooklyn. President Street."

  "Whaddya know. Me, I'm from-"

  "Astoria," Bert put in. "Right around Crescent Street."

  Joey gave an uneasy little laugh. "You tryin' to make me, like, paranoid?"

  "Joey," said the old man. He leaned back on his stool to give his young companion a chance to see him whole. "You really don't remember me? I guess I've really fucking aged."

  Joey scanned the old man's long and loose-skinned face, and meanwhile Bert went on. "And if ya don't mind my saying so as an old family friend"-he pointed to the earpiece of Joey's sunglasses looped over his shirt pocket-"carrying your glasses that way, it makes you look like a pimp."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah," said Bert. "And speaking of which, if you're gonna pimp, try females. You might do better."

  "You know about that." It wasn't a question, and Joey no longer sounded surprised.

  "Small town, Joey. Very small town. But hey, that goes for every town. New York's the same. Joey, your father's a friend a mine, a business friend. And I knew your mother. A lovely woman. Plus which, I knew you, Joey, when you were a little kid. Four, five years old. Too little to remember, I guess. I useta see you inna park. You had the curliest hair of any kid there. You don't remember?"

  The old man's lips were full and always moving, as if his teeth didn't set too comfortably in his gums. His ears were close to his head but big and soft, with fleshy lobes. His shirt was immaculate, with a pattern of white diamonds embossed on a white background, the starched wings of the collar as straight and even as the tail fins of a plane. "Bert," said Joey. "Bert." He screwed his face into deep-memory mode; then it unwound into a tentative smile. "Bert the Shirt?"

  The old man give a quick and furtive glance around the virtually empty bar. " Piano, piano, Joey. That's not a name I'm known by anymore. It's just Bert d'Ambrosia, retiree."

  "Bert," Joey repeated, like the name tasted good in his mouth. "Sure I remember. My mother liked you. Said you were a gentleman. And you always had hard candies in your pocket." Then Joey's face darkened and by primitive reflex he recoiled. "But hey, I thought you were dead."

  "I was," said the old man casually, pulling the cherry out of his whiskey sour and nuzzling the fruit off its stem. Taking his time, he licked the froth from his lips and smiled.

  Old people took a grim delight in talking about their ailments and operations, about their arteries hardening and their brains softening, their ankles swelling and their field of vision shrinking. In Florida these small epics of collapse and decay had become both an art form and a competitive sport, and Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia had polished his delivery to the point where he was seldom beaten in the ghoulish contests. He had the best material, after all. Arthritis, phlebitis, prostate trouble, even cancer-these things couldn't hold a candle to a guy who'd actually died.

 
; "Yeah, Joey, I was fucking dead. Scientifically, electronically dead. Morto, capeesh? Yeah. This was about eight years ago.

  "You remember what the papers called the I-Beam Trial? Big-ass fucking trial. RICO. Construction racketeering, shit like that? They pulled in everybody. All the families. Some guys they booked, some guys they just subpoenaed. Big publicity splash. Well, a few guys didn't wanna go to court, remember? They faked angina, fainting spells, whatever.

  "Me," Bert went on, "I went. I wasn't indicted. They were just yankin' my chain. I figured fuck 'em, they wanna put me on the stand, I can take the heat. Big mistake, Joey. I get to court, there's a million reporters on the steps, the prosecutors are in their best suits, cameras are in my face. I start not feeling good. I get clammy, my arms start to tingle. I get this tightness in my chest, and all I can think of is that it's like a fucking meatball rolling toward my heart. I'm thinking, Shirt, you asshole, all those big-ass steaks, all that booze, all those cigarettes, all that tension-now you're gonna die right here on the six o'clock news.

  "I can hardly talk. I whisper to my lawyer, 'Hey, Bruce, I think I'm havin' a heart attack.' He laughs. He thinks I'm fuckin' around. 'Hey, that wasn't the plan,' he says. "You wanted to appear.' Then he notices I'm turning blue.

  "So now I'm on a stretcher, they're carrying me back down the courthouse steps. My eyes are closed, and I can still see flashbulbs going off. And it dawns on me, the one good thing about dying. I went to court to play the big man, show everybody I wasn't afraid. Now I couldn't give a fuck what anybody thought. They wanna think I'm a common criminal, they wanna think I'm a coward, fuck does it matter? You live, you die. I should care what these assholes thinka me?