The Stingray Shuffle

by Tim Dorsey

  The sun finally disappeared and Serge sat back in his seat. “Thanks for letting me do that. I think I got some great shots. It’s important to record every sunset I can.”

  The businessman looked at Serge a second, then went back to his book.

  “Yes, sir! Flying to the Big Apple! Goin’ to Gotham! Matriculatin’ to Manhattan! New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice…”

  The man took a deep breath and put his book down.

  “I love flying but I hate airlines!” Serge told the man. “Who can keep all the fares and discounts straight? Frequent flyer miles, three hundred and nine dollars if you order fourteen days in advance, two fifty-nine if you stay over a Saturday, one nineteen provided you don’t get off the plane…”

  The man looked at Serge another moment, then picked up his book again.

  “Oh, trying to read, eh? Don’t let me distract you.” Serge faced forward for thirty seconds. “So what are you reading?”

  The man turned the book over and showed Serge the cover.

  “Ralph Krunkleton?” said Serge. “I love Ralph Krunkleton. Read all his stuff back in school. Personally, I think that’s his best book, balances surrealism with traditional murder mystery machinations. But don’t worry, I won’t give away the ending.”

  The man smiled politely and went back to reading. Serge stared forward another thirty seconds. Then he leaned over and whispered the ending.

  The man dropped the book in his lap in exasperation.

  “What?” said Serge. “I just did you a favor. That’s the big mistake people make reading Krunkleton. They get all caught up in the suspense plot. Now you can concentrate on the prose, lyrical language selection and social nuances. And don’t forget the five million dollars that’s floating around. You’ll never guess who gets it…. Oh, I just told you. Sorry.”

  The man put the book away.

  “Good idea,” said Serge. “They’re preparing the serving cart. You wouldn’t want to spill anything.” Serge lowered his tray and folded his hands on it and smiled. Then he started tapping his fingers. He stuck his head out in the aisle. “What’s taking them so long?”

  He reached up to the overhead console and twisted a nozzle. A blast of cold air began blowing the man’s hair around. He turned slowly toward Serge.

  “Whoops, wrong one.” Serge twisted the nozzle shut and twisted another, then closed his eyes and stuck his face up in the chilly stream. The man picked up an airline magazine.

  Serge opened his eyes and turned off the vent. He pressed other buttons. Lights flashed on and off the magazine the man was trying to read.

  “Need a reading light?” asked Serge. “Don’t want to ruin your eyes.” Lights continued flashing on and off.

  “Here comes the cart! I love the cart!” said Serge. “All the choices—so hard to decide. There’s the spicy Bloody Mary mix and orange juice and soda. They only pour half the can in those little cups, but you can ask them to leave the whole can. That’s what I do.”

  Serge leaned into the aisle and looked forward toward Row 11. The sleeve of a tropical shirt and the bandaged foot were still there. He leaned back.

  The attendant came to their row, and the businessman handed her eight dollars. “Scotch. Double.”

  “Coke,” said Serge. “Please leave the can. And can I have one of those huge, huge bags of peanuts—I haven’t eaten in days! Ha, ha, ha, ha…”

  He turned to the man. “Oh, a drinker, eh? It’s weird how times changed about that. One day you’re Mr. Sophistication, and the next you’re a social leper with a stigmatizing disease….”

  The man chugged his scotch and set the glass on his tray next to two empty airline miniatures.

  “You might want to go easy on that stuff,” said Serge. “I don’t mean to preach, but there are all kinds of new federal aviation rules about in-flight behavior. You don’t want to annoy other passengers.”

  Serge stood and got a box down from the overhead compartment. He sat and placed it in his lap. “Want to see my trains?”

  Serge opened the box of model railroad equipment. “See? That green-and-orange engine there is The City of Miami. I painted it myself. Here, hold this….” Serge rummaged through the box, cabooses, tracks, water towers. “…There she is! This baby is precisely to scale. It’s Flagler’s personal car, the Rambler. Built her from scratch. Hold this….” More rummaging. “And this is the observation car from The Silver Stingray. That’s one of the great trains that take the snowbirds to Florida. Hold this….” He picked up a passenger car, looked in the windows, put it back down. “You should have seen them at the X-ray machine when this baby went through. About ten people crowded around the screen. They took the box off to a special area and had a dog sniff it.” Serge grinned impishly. “It was partly my doing. I arranged some of the metal tracks and trains in the shape of a machine gun, just to keep them on their toes. I have to make sure I’m safe when I fly…. Darn it, did I remember to pack my diesel?…” More rummaging.

  The man spoke for the first time. “You know, the rest rooms on these things have all kinds of levers and buttons and secret compartments.”

  Serge stared at him a moment, then quickly grabbed all the trains from the man’s arms, repacked the box and returned it to the overhead. He got up and trotted toward the back of the plane.

  Twenty minutes later, a stewardess had Serge by the arm and escorted him back to his seat over his protests. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to disable the smoke detector. I was exploring….”

  Serge reluctantly sat down. He thought a second. He reached under his seat for his camera.

  The businessman was typing on his laptop. He could feel Serge’s eyes drilling into the side of his head.

  “Listen…” said Serge.

  The man sighed and closed his laptop.

  “I’d like to take some more pictures again when we land. Will that be okay? If it isn’t, I’ll understand. Life is so fleeting I want to capture every moment. I’ll just set the motor drive on automatic and let ’er rip.”

  The Boeing 737 banked over Long Island for its approach. The landing gear went down. Serge leaned across the man again and pressed his lens to the pressure window. Click, click, click. “I’m getting goose bumps.” Click, click, click. “This is just like that U2 song…. You like U2?…Of course! Everybody does!…It was a cold and wet December day when we touched the ground at JFK…” Click, click, click.

  The Boeing taxied up to the terminal. Serge unlatched the overhead bin. “I only take carry-ons. Checking your luggage is playing with fire….” He turned, but the businessman was already halfway up the aisle.

  “Hey!” Serge yelled. “We forgot to exchange phone numbers….”

  28

  New York City. Manhattan. East Side.

  Eugene Tibbs was blue. That was his job.

  He had always been blue.

  He was blue back in his days on the Mississippi Delta, in those cotton fields, and he was blue in Memphis, on Union Avenue, recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio. He was blue after selling his soul to the devil late one night at the crossroads. And he was blue because he didn’t sell his soul for talent and fame but for a sandwich. That’s what cheap liquor will do to you. That’s what the blues does to you.

  Tibbs sat in the last car of the 4-5-6 subway line as it clattered and sparked under Grand Central Station. Well after midnight, Eugene was alone in the car, reading a paperback by Ralph Krunkleton. He looked out the scratched window at a group of laughing people in the seedy yellow light on the Fifty-first Street platform. They couldn’t fool him. They were blue, too. He could tell. He knew the blues.

  Tibbs had just returned from Florida. More like fled. He had been let go from a steady run at Skipper’s Smokehouse, the legendary blues joint on Tampa’s north side. His last night there had started blue enough, but there was trouble waiting down the tracks for Tibbs. He sat in a chair onstage, wearing a neat black tuxedo and cradling his faithful hollow-body Epipho
ne guitar, Gertrude. That’s when trouble walked in the door.

  Eugene performed as Blind Jelly Doughnut, and his sunglasses were so dark he could safely watch a solar eclipse. They made him bump into things, and people thought he really was blind and his music, therefore, the bluest of all. If you were blind and not blue, something was wrong.

  But even with the sunglasses, Tibbs recognized the man who came in the club that night. He’d recognize him anywhere, and it might as well have been the devil himself, wanting to talk about that sandwich. Damn the blues.

  The man came right down to the stage and took a seat at a cocktail table in the front row. He set his glass of ice water down and pulled out a notepad. It was that damn Atkins fellow from Alabama, the blues historian who’d been stalking him for an interview. The man just wouldn’t take no.

  It unsettled Tibbs seeing him sitting there, quietly confident, watching, waiting for a slip—the man could ruin everything. It became a war of nerves. Eugene broke out in a sweat. After the third song, he began to cough. The man in the front row stood and silently offered Tibbs his glass of water.

  “Thank you,” said Eugene, taking the glass.

  The man jumped back and pointed. “He can see! He can see! I knew it!”

  The audience was horrified, houselights came on, a scuffle broke out. Eugene barely escaped, running three blocks and ducking into an adult theater. He peeked out the window at the mob running past the theater with torches and clubs. Don’t mess with the blues.

  Tibbs caught the first flight back to New York. He took a bus to the Port Authority Terminal, then tried to use the subway, but he didn’t have the right change. When you’re blue, you never have the right change. That’s the way it works. Rock and roll gets the limos. The blues makes you walk. It was another dozen blocks across the Village back to his loft apartment in SoHo, next to the nineteenth-century carriage house on Crosby Street where Billie Holiday used to live.

  At times like these, Eugene liked to read himself to sleep with his favorite author. He picked up a paperback, the one with the stingray on the cover. It was his favorite author because his books were always in the bargain bin. Eugene opened the book to a folded-over page and lay down on the cold mattress in his skivvies. But tonight, the book did not make him sleepy. It spoke to him. He got out of bed, dressed, put on his boots. He stuck the book in his back pocket, scratched around a dresser drawer for correct change and headed back to the subway.

  That’s where he was now, in the last car of the 4-5-6, standing up, approaching the Eighty-sixth Street station. It was almost five a.m. when he reached Park Avenue. The Upper East Side was still and dark except for puffs of steam from the grates that drifted slowly across the empty street. There wasn’t much time left before the garbage trucks would come. Eugene began grabbing Glad bags of trash off the stoops of million-dollar apartments, taking as much as he could carry and running two blocks to Central Park and into the woods. He began sorting through the trash, the lion’s share worthless to him. But shortly after sunrise, he had what he’d come for: six empty bottles of the most expensive cologne from Saks and Blooming-dale’s. He jammed them into his jacket and headed for a drugstore on Seventy-ninth.

  Soon he was climbing out of the subway on Bleecker Street with four bags from Rite Aid. Back in his apartment, he spread the contents on the floor. Economy sacks of green mints, red-and-white hard-candy mints, peppermint patties, Tic Tacs, mouthwash, a big pouch of disposable Bic razors, shaving cream, combs, Aqua Velva, toenail clippers, files, No Doz, Sominex, a two-liter bottle of generic cologne and a large pickle jar of discontinued condoms.

  He poured the generic cologne in the designer bottles from Park Avenue, then packed everything into an old briefcase he’d pulled down from his closet. He got out his paperback again, to make sure he’d done everything just the way the character in the book had. Then he lay back in his bed and waited.

  Limos arrived at the curb outside the Hotel Carlyle on East Seventy-seventh.

  Eugene Tibbs approached on foot from the south. He was wearing the tuxedo from his blue days and carrying his briefcase. He made one last stop at a print shop.

  “Yes, I’d like your Fifteen-Minute Instant Business Card Special.”

  “What do you want them to say?”

  He pulled the paperback from his pocket, opened it to a dog-eared page and pointed at something he’d underlined. “This right here.”

  “You got it.”

  “And can I have my change in ones?”

  Fifteen minutes later, he left the print shop and walked the last few blocks to the Carlyle. A long line spilled out of the café. Inside was a hospitality industry ant farm: service people moving in all directions, maître d’, greeters, coat checkers, table captains, waiters, water pourers. Tonight there was also an armed guard because Woody Allen was playing the clarinet. Eugene still couldn’t believe anyone would pay the sixty-dollar cover charge. He decided he’d never understand white people.

  Eugene walked past the coat line.

  “Excuse me,” said the guard. “Where are you going?”

  Eugene produced a business card from his jacket. The guard studied it and handed it back. “Go ahead.”

  Eugene stuck the card back in his jacket and wound his way through the hotel to the men’s room. He set the briefcase on the counter next to the sink and opened it. He removed the contents, setting out mints and aftershave and cologne in precise arrangement. Then, the final touch: the tip basket with a few ones from Eugene’s own wallet.

  Three hours later, Eugene counted up his tips. The paperback had been right—there must be five hundred dollars here. Eugene heard the rest-room door opening, and he stashed the money in his pocket.

  A small, redheaded man with a clarinet case walked into the men’s room. He finished his business; Eugene handed him a paper towel.

  “Do you need anything, sir?”

  The man looked around to see if anyone else was there, then pointed.

  “Mint?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Condom?”

  He nodded.

  Eugene opened the jar. “How many?”

  “Five…no, six.”

  The man stuffed the foil pouches in his instrument case, threw a twenty in the tip basket and left quickly.

  That was just the beginning. Eugene Tibbs pulled down five grand in the next month, making two- and three-night stands at the Four Seasons, the Waldorf, Tavern on the Green, constantly rotating to avoid suspicion. There were enough four-star restaurants and hotels in Manhattan that he could change locations every night and not run out for the rest of his life. As long as Eugene didn’t deviate from the plan in his paperback, everything went smoothly. Oh, sure, there was the occasional skepticism, but the book had anticipated that. Eugene compiled a list of restaurant owners’ names from the department of health, and he called ahead each night to ask the name of that evening’s maître d’.

  “Nobody told me about this!” said the maître d’ at Sardi’s, studying Eugene’s business card.

  Eugene didn’t say anything, just stood there holding his briefcase like he was bored, staring at caricatures of Liza and Anthony Quinn.

  “And I’ve never heard of your company either.” The maître d’ read the card again: Big Apple Urinal Guys—restaurants, hotels, weddings, bar mitzvahs. Bonded, references.

  The maître d’ turned the card over. He saw two names in pencil: his own and that of the restaurant’s owner.

  “Where’d you get these names?”

  “My boss. Those are the people I’m supposed to ask for if there’s any trouble.”

  The maître d’ began to perspire. He stuck a finger in his collar to loosen it. He picked up the phone under the brass lamp on the reservation podium and dialed the number on the card. He got Eugene’s answering machine. “…Big Apple Urinal Guys, we’re not in…”

  The maître d’ hung up. His Adam’s apple stuck out.

  Eugene remembered what the boo
k had said. There’s a point in conflict resolution when the next person who talks loses. You’re ready to play with the big boys when you can recognize that moment.

  The maître d’ coughed. “I, wait, uh…”

  “I won’t need an escort,” said Eugene, moving past the man for the men’s room.

  The money rolled in. The Essex House, Trattoria, the Brasserie. Eugene experimented by wearing his dark sunglasses and offering paper towels in the wrong direction, but the increase in sympathy tips was offset by people who waved a hand in front of Eugene’s face and then took money out of the basket.

  He couldn’t complain. The hours and money were great—it was working out just like it did for the character in his paperback. Eugene was making a fortune as the Wildcat Urinal Guy.

  It being New York, however, the scheme did have limits. One night in a regional French bistro on Amsterdam Avenue, Eugene learned the hard way that the mob had a hand in the urinal guy rackets on the West Side, and he was toilet-dunked by two guys in sharkskin suits. He got home and found his loft apartment had been tossed.

  So he stuck to midtown and the East Side. He began taking other precautions he’d learned about in his paperback. When he left his apartment each day, he lightly sprinkled talcum powder on the doorknob and some more in front of the threshold, only enough to notice if you looked. He went out on the fire escape and taped a human hair across the base of the window.

  A week went by without incident. He was working Rockefeller Center that Friday when he was approached by a capo in La Cosa Nostra. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Eugene was a pro by now, and the mob had taken notice. They’d also become increasingly unsatisfied with their own soldiers assigned to urinal duty—guys whose heart wasn’t in it, slouching against the sink in Naugahyde jackets, smoking, listening to Knicks games on transistor radios.

  “Excuse me, could I have a mint?”

  “You want a mint? Sure, I’ll give you a mint. I’ll shove it up your fuckin’ ass, you fuckin’ douche bag!”