Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  “There’s a part of the Midrash that says, essentially, we are all allowed to find enjoyment in the company of others,” David said. He’d found that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with the word “essentially,” and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, people left him feeling like they’d learned something. It was true that he knew a few things from the Midrash, had even read a great deal of it, but, in dealing with an eighteen-year-old girl just learning the joys of a filmed gangbang, he didn’t feel the need to reach too deep. “Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Shoshana? Of course not. It’s something far, far worse. Do you understand?”

  He let go of the girl’s hands then and handed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and smiled wanly at David, though now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Thank you so much, Rabbi Cohen. I think I see that path now,” she said and slid out of the booth, not even bothering to return his hanky to him.

  Bennie, unfortunately, took her spot. “Fuck’s wrong with her?”

  “Confused about love,” David said.

  Bennie nodded. “Who isn’t?”

  It was weird. Over the course of their rather unconventional business relationship, Bennie Savone had found it necessary to use David as his father confessor, too, even though he knew that Rabbi David Cohen was previously Sal Cupertine; that before he was a fake rabbi, he was a Chicago “associate” who’d accidentally killed three undercover Donnie Brasco motherfuckers on the same botched contract, and that, barring a sudden religious experience the likes of which only happened in prison movies, David’s moral center was still pretty opaque. Still, David reasoned that Bennie needed to talk to someone, particularly since the one person Bennie could depend on previously had been the rabbi David replaced three years ago, Rabbi Ronald Kales, who also happened to be Bennie’s father-in-law . . . or was, until that unfortunate “boating accident” on Lake Meade claimed his life.

  David knew that Bennie’s decision not to fish out of the same shallow, polluted pond of local and loyal Italian women or coke-whore strippers most of his friends and co-workers had, opting instead to get connected with the real Las Vegas money—the Summerlin Jews—was still a source of some lingering organizational shame; an issue David was certainly intimate with.

  “Yes, well,” David said. “She’s still young.”

  “My daughter tells me Shoshana likes black guys,” Bennie says.

  Sometimes David tried to imagine what his life would be like if he were still in Chicago, but he’d somehow had a different kind of upbringing, so that now he was selling real estate on the North Shore or running a sports bar or deli or was just a fucking Culligan Man, his ends meeting, his life happy. Would he still end up on Tuesday mornings gossiping about whom eighteen-year-old girls were or were not fucking?

  “I have to prepare for a talk at the Senior Center this afternoon,” David said, “so I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chat. Can we get down to business?”

  “Of course, Rabbi,” Bennie said. “I’d hate to get in the way of your busy schedule of dick and ribbon cuttings.” Bennie reached into his attaché and pulled out a manila envelope and slid it across the table. “You got a funeral on Thursday and one coming up next week, too. Maybe two. Have to see how that one shakes out. Got a very sick relative. Could go anytime.”

  David just nodded. The holidays tended to be Bennie’s busy season with murder, and now that they were flying bodies (or at least parts of them) in on private jets periodically from Chicago or driving them up from Los Angeles, David expected the news. Plus, David sort of marveled at Bennie’s ingenuity; the guy seemed like a dumb crook from the outside, but on the inside Bennie had a real aptitude for business. Stan and Alta Goldblatt might have been big donors, but Bennie Savone, with his Jewish wife and three Jewish children, was like fucking UNICEF to Temple Beth Israel. He single-handedly financed the building of Summerlin’s first Jewish mortuary and cemetery behind the Temple’s expansive campus on Hillpointe, championed the new high school that was breaking ground in the spring, and, of course, regularly met with the Temple’s esteemed rabbi over at the Bagel Café to discuss the livelihood of the Jewish faith (or whatever the fuck that shit rag mob columnist John L. Smith in the Review-Journal said in one of his weekly innuendo-fests. If David ever had the desire to start killing people again, he’d start with that hack) and issues related to the regular laundering of over fifteen million dollars every year through the Temple’s coffers. David imagined that Bennie’s long-range foresight could help a lot of Fortune 500 companies—it’s not like any other mobsters had the fucking chutzpah to bury their enemies and war dead in a cemetery, nor the willingness to put all the pieces in place years before they’d even see them in action. That Bennie earned most of his living from strip clubs didn’t bother anyone at the Temple. That’s where everyone did business anyway.

  “Fine,” David said. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Bennie said. “My wife wants to know what your Hanukkah plans are this year.”

  “I’ll be staying home,” David said, though the truth was that at least half the time would be spent at the Temple making sure the young rabbi he’d entrusted with most of the social activities didn’t burn the fucking place down, literally. That kid was a menace around an open flame.

  “You know you got an open invitation,” Bennie said. “Come over all eight nights. Spin the fucking dreidel. Eat fucking pancakes. Listen to Neil Diamond sing ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.’You like Neil Diamond, right, Rabbi?”

  What David really wanted, more than anything, was to get up from the booth, climb into his Range Rover, and drive it into a brick wall, just to feel something authentic again, even if it was pain. “The Jewish Sinatra,” David said.

  Shoshana brought David his bagel and coffee and discreetly set his hanky back down on the table. He looked up at her and she seemed . . . happy. Like she’d had a tremendous weight lifted from her shoulders and now could go on living her life in perfect happiness, her every orifice filled with big black cock. David felt something shift in his bowels; something he thought might be his conscience picking up enema speed.

  “Listen,” David said quietly after Shoshana left. “I gotta get out of here. A vacation. Something. I’m about to lose my mind. Promise me, after Christmas, you’ll look at this situation. It’s been fifteen years, Benjamin.” He said Bennie’s full first name just to piss him off a little. “You realize I haven’t even left the city limits since 9/11?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bennie said, “sure. Talk to me again after the holidays. We’ll see what we can do. Don’t want you getting sof t . . . Sally.”

  Rabbi David Cohen looked out the window again and wondered how it was he was the only fucking person who happened in Vegas and now had to fucking stay in Vegas. Put his old mug shot on a tourist brochure then see how many people kept visiting.

  When David first came to Las Vegas in 1993—back when he was still Sal Cupertine—he couldn’t get over how wide open the desert was, how at night, if you weren’t on the Strip or downtown, the sky seemed to stretch for miles unimpeded. At dusk, Red Rock Canyon would glow golden with strands of dying sunlight, and he’d imagine what his wife, Jennifer, would have made of the vision. She was always taking art classes at the community college in Chicago, though never with much success, but he thought then that if she were with him in Las Vegas and tried to paint the sunset, well, he’d pretend to love her interpretation. Used to be pretending was hard work. He was only thirty-five when he got to Las Vegas, but still felt seventeen, which meant he wasn’t scared of anyone and didn’t give a damn if he hurt people’s feelings. It was a good skill set for his previous line of work, but David had long ago concluded it was shit on his interpersonal relationships. And the irony, of course, was that now all he ever did anymore was pretend while listening to people’s problems. David was inclined to believe that his adopted religion was right abou
t heaven and hell being a place on Earth.

  It was four o’clock on Wednesday, and David was already late for a meeting at the Temple about next year’s Jewish Book Fair, but he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the previous morning’s conversation with Shoshana, and the one directly following it with Bennie, had somehow clarified a few things that had been gnawing at his mind the last several weeks. So instead of attending the meeting, he drove his Temple-purchased Range Rover the four blocks from his Temple-purchased home on the fifteenth hole at TPC over to Bruce Trent Park, where he wandered among the stalls being set up for the Farmer’s Market and tried to line up his priorities.

  He stopped and smelled some apples, made idle talk about funnel cakes with the Mexican girl fixing them over what looked like a Bunsen burner, watched children fling themselves over and under the monkey bars. If he closed his eyes and just focused on what he could hear and smell, it was almost like he was back in Chicago, though by now the sounds and smells tended to mostly remind him of his first days in Las Vegas when he spent all of his time foolishly searching for things that reminded him of home. It had grown increasingly difficult for David to even conjure that memory accurately, since the landscape, both mental and physical, had changed so drastically in the intervening years. Where there used to be open vistas, the Howard Hughes Corporation had built the master-planned community of Summerlin, filling in the desert with thousands of houses, absurd traffic circles instead of stop signs, acres of green grass, and the commerce such development demanded: looming casinos that eroded his favorite mountain views, Target after Target, a Starbucks every thirty paces, and shopping centers anchored on one corner by a Smith’s and on the other by some bar that was just a video poker machine with a roof.

  But something about today seemed to cloak everything in radiance. Orthodox Jews tended to talk about such things as if they were moments of vast spiritual enlightenment, though David tended to think the Orthodox Jews were a little on the fruity side of things—always dropping Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Bones like that guy wasn’t a fucking whack job of the first order—so it was a good thing Temple Beth Israel was reform, which meant David just had to know some of that hocus-pocus shit, but didn’t have to talk about it too much and certainly didn’t have to dress in that stupid black getup. Still, his mind felt clear today, and whether it was a religious experience or just the settling of some internal debts didn’t particularly vex David, because the result was the same: chiefly, that he knew he needed to get the fuck out of Las Vegas before he killed himself and took twenty or thirty motherfuckers with him in the process.

  That his life had become a suffocation of ironies didn’t bother him. No, it was the realization that in just three weeks he’d turn fifty, and yet he constantly waited for his front door to be kicked in by U.S. Marshals; that he wasn’t some dumb punk anymore who could just live his life in blindness while other people controlled his exterior life; and that, well, he missed his wife more and more with each passing moment.

  The Savone family had been good to him, he couldn’t deny that. They’d set him up in this life when they could have scattered him over the Midwest one tendon at a time—even had Rabbi Kales privately tutor him for two years before he started this long con, first as an assistant at the Temple’s Children’s Center (where he actually had responsibilities for the first time in his life), and then, steadily, they pushed him up through the Temple’s ranks until, when it became clear that Rabbi Kales’s old age and inability to shut the fuck up had become a liability, he ascended to the top spot.

  He had a beautiful home. A beautiful car. If he needed a woman, Bennie took care of that, too. The problem was that the world around him was changing. Locally, only Bennie knew he was a fake anymore, all the other players having gone down in a fit of meshugass over at the WildHorse strip club that left a tourist dead and another one without the ability to speak. Eventually, Bennie would end up getting busted on some RICO shit (or, praise be, Bennie’s wife Rachel would get a fucking sliver of conscience and/or retrospect and would roll on that fat fuck), and then one morning David would wake up and the U.S. Marshals would shove a big hook in his mouth and dangle him all over the press, the big fish that got away finally on the line.

  And then there was the paralyzing issue of technology. When the Savone family moved him out of Chicago after the fuck-up, he had to leave everything behind, including his wife, Jennifer, and his infant son, William. At first, it was easy to keep them out of his mind—it was either forget them or get the death penalty, which would probably be meted out by about fifteen cops in a very small cell. But as time went on and his life became a mundane series of mornings spent holding babies’ bloody dicks, brunch meetings filled with whiny plasticized rich bitches who couldn’t decide which charity should get the glory of their attention, afternoons spent in pink and yellow polo shirts as he golfed with men who would have fucking spit on him in Chicago, and nights spent alone in his Ethan Allen-show room living room, flipping channels, jerking off to Cinemax, thinking about disappearing, just getting the fuck out, moving to Mexico, or Canada, or even Los Angeles, he began paving roads toward Jennifer and William.

  It was so easy: he just typed their names into Google and came up with William’s MySpace page. William was seventeen now and, if his pictures were any judge, was in desperate need of some guidance. Every single picture, his fucking pants were halfway down his ass, he was throwing some fucking gang sign that actually spelled out MOB, and he had a Yankees cap—a fucking Yankees cap!—turned sideways on his head, which made him look like a fucking retard, though not unlike half the kids David saw Saturdays at the Temple. He only saw Jennifer in the background of a few photos, and it broke his heart to see how old she’d become, how her straight blond hair was now silver, how her body had grown frumpy. Time and pressure had turned her into an old woman while he was busy fucking strippers and running a goddamned Jewish empire in the middle of the desert.

  But she was there. He could see her. She existed. He checked the archives of the Tribune and Sun-Times to see if her name had been in any marriage announcements but came up empty. David knew that didn’t mean anything concrete, but he also thought that if she had remarried, William wouldn’t have turned into such a fucking putz.

  Over the last several months, he’d started looking at Google satellite photos of his old house (where, according to a simple public record search, Jennifer and William still lived). Though all he could really see was the roof and the general outline of the house, he could make out bits of himself, too: the pool, which he’d purchased after he got paid for his first substantial hit (a guy he ran track with in high school, Gil Williams, whose father was city councilman); the towering blue ash tree in the front yard, where he hung a tire swing for William; the brick driveway, Jennifer’s dream, which he laid brick by brick over the course of a long weekend. Before he understood that the photos were static and not updated regularly, David would return each day to refresh the image, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife, who he was sure he could recognize even from outer space.

  Did she know he was still alive? Did she spend nights searching for him, too? Did she know he’d turned gray, too, but that he’d stayed in shape all of these years, working out, still hitting the heavy bag at the gym when he could, keeping himself ready, just in case—knowing, waiting, thinking that eventually, if he had to, he could kill someone with his hands again, just like in the day. Happy with the thought. Thinking, yesterday: You think I’m soft? I could shove that attaché case up your ass, Bennie. And now. Now. When would things ever be tenable if they weren’t now? Life, David realized, had reached a terminal point. Years ago, Rabbi Kales explained to David that when the end of days came, the Jews would be resurrected into a perfect state and the whole of the world would take on the status of Israel, and the Jews, he told him, would live in peace there. “What about me?” David had asked then, and Rabbi Kales just shook his head and said that he’d likely just rot in the ground, right
beside him probably, in light of the experience they were embroiled in. He laughed when he said it, but David was pretty sure he meant it. Well, fuck that, David thought now. It was time to get tenable.

  David purchased a small bundle of sweet smelling incense from a hippie-looking girl with a barbell through her tongue. He’d seen this girl before—may be fifty times, actually, since he was pretty sure she’d been there every single time he’d visited the Farmer’s Market—but had never bothered to really notice her apart from the fact that she always stood there placidly selling fucking incense. What kind of life was that? Selling smell. She smiled sweetly at him, and David wondered how much kids today knew about the fucking world, about how things really were, how it wasn’t all just iPods and MySpace and throwing gang signs on the Internet, that there was something permanent about the decisions being made around them. Ramifications. Spiritual and physical. If kids wanted to know what it meant to be tough, they’d take a look at the Torah, see how the Jews rolled, see how revenge and power were really exerted. David liked thinking about the Jews as Chosen People, liked thinking that maybe, after all these years, he’d been chosen, too. You wander the desert for forty years—or just fifteen—you begin to change your perspective on things, begin to appreciate what you had before you got lost, begin to see signs, warnings, omens. Not everything was so obvious. Not everything had to be digitized to be real. Sometimes, man, you had to look inside of things.

  “Let me ask you a question,” David said to the girl with the pierced tongue. “Do you know me?”