Slot Attendant

by Jack Engelhard

  “I know him. I like him.”

  “Well he’s under suspicion.”

  “Toledo?”

  “You’re not really surprised.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “He’s Puerto Rican, or Mexican, I’m not sure. He’s comes from a tough neighborhood. He’s trying to move up. He’s a good kid. He’s no thief.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Character.”

  “Well, we think he’s doing it alone or as part of a ring.”

  “This is news to me.”

  “If you knew, would you tell?”

  I have to think about this.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could be charged with complicity.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “Toledo or you?”

  “Both.”

  He gets up and starts walking me to the door.

  “I want you to know how serious this is.”

  “I know.”

  “The drop comes up short five thousand dollars a day. That adds up.”

  “Could be anybody.”

  “Exactly. A distinguished author like you, how did you get mixed up with this element?”

  “There is no element, Sir. There’s only the job.”

  “I hope, for your sake, you’ll see fit to inform us if you know anything.”

  He tells me that crime doesn’t pay.

  Does virtue?

  Back on the casino floor I make hasty rounds for Franco. I don’t know what zone he’s in but he’d be easy to spot for his height and his bulk. The place is jumping and I know I better find him quick before some supervisor detains me. I find him by the nickels where he’s on runner duty, carrying and doling cash to the winners and shouldering bags for hopper fills. Mark the guard, who thinks he’s George the auto mechanic from another life, is pushing the cart and Franco keeps unloading bags of coins from hopper to hopper.

  Mark greets me with his usual smile and appears surprised when I don’t smile back. Mark’s always ready for some snappy give and take.

  “This is not about you,” I whisper.

  “I get the picture,” Mark says, nodding toward Franco.

  “Right.”

  I step up to Franco, who’s just dumped one bag, locked the door and moving on. I approach, blocking his path.

  “Franco, I’m remembering this.”

  “What you talking about, man?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Move. You’re in my way.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Move, man.”

  Mark doesn’t interfere. He could. But he doesn’t. He knows, or suspects, what’s going on.

  “I’m remembering this, man.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “Watch your language,” Mark cautions Franco. “Customers.”

  “I’m remembering this.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Franco has the last word, for the moment.

  After that I feel better but I don’t feel big. I feel small. Maybe Detective Stevenson was right. There is an element.

  But is it the element or is it Franco? No, it’s Franco. I’m tired…I really am tired of being here and being asked what I’m doing here.

  What the hell am I doing here! Aren’t there books waiting to be written? But here I am, here I am.

  I’m ready to take the escalator up to the supervisor’s office to find out where they want me. I’d originally been assigned to Zone 14, as usual. Siberia. But they’d replaced me there with a substitute on account of this investigation business. So on my way to the escalator I catch Carmella in the Hot 7s section where she can’t seem to get a slot door to open.

  “My key isn’t working.”

  The customer makes no secret of his impatience.

  “You people,” he says, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “What a joint.”

  He wants us to know how disgusted he is. Right now, we’re everybody who’s dumped on him all his life.

  I try my key and it’s fixed. We walk away together, Carmella and I, and as we do so our hips meet and she whispers that she needs to talk to me. We check around to make sure no supervisors are in the vicinity and dash for the loading dock nearby. It’s always freezing out there (or broiling in the summer) but there are several dark corners that are invitations to hide, and we hide.

  I cannot help but notice how sensationally beautiful she is. Really, this is a waste, the job, the uniform that covers all that splendor, and the husband, a creep, half her size, that I finally met a couple of days ago. What a creep and what a waste! How someone like her fell for someone like that I’ll never know. She does have it over Jennifer Lopez, except for luck.

  “Promise you won’t tell,” she says.

  This is like the fifth grade. More like the third grade.

  “What?”

  “Omar.”

  “Omar what?”

  “He came on to me.”

  I admit that I am not surprised. Who wouldn’t?

  “You don’t understand. He propositioned me.”

  “I’m still not surprised.”

  Occupational hazard, I’m figuring – for beautiful women.

  “He touched me.”

  Now I’m surprised.

  “How? Where?”

  “Where do you think?”

  She’s smiling.

  “I can only guess.”

  She’s still smiling. She unbuttons her blouse, unhooks her bra and reveals the eighth wonder of the world. “This is so you won’t have to guess.” Then: “No man can touch me there except my husband – and you, now you. Okay?” Well, yes, okay, and here we go, and there seems no end to this sensation, though her heavy breathing is nearly alarming.

  She undoes her slacks, slips out of her panties (what a sight!) and says, “Here, too.” This should be a bridge too far. She says, “Only the fingers, okay?”

  Okay.

  “I like it fast and slow,” she says, her eyelids flickering open and shut, mostly shut now – “fast and slow, fast and slow, yes, faster, slower, yes, faster, slower, yes, like that, just like that, now very fast. Please, very fast. Please. Come on. Come on. Come on. Now please faster, faster, harder, harder, deeper, deeper, like that, like that, yes, yes, yes.” I think she’s done, by the sounds of it, from the rhythm of her breathing, but she’s not, not done. “Now the palm of your hand, please, the outside, gently, yes, like that, like that, now rub, keep rubbing, gently, very gently, like that, yes, oh yes, and inside, go inside with your fingers, deep, yes, like that, but fast, please, fast, faster, faster, please faster, fast, fast, fast – yes.”

  Then: “Can I kiss it?” she asks, pleadingly. She unzips me and unpacks me and goes to work, same method, fast, slow, faster, slower, faster, speed to the whirlwind.

  She dresses herself back up except for the bra. Needs my help hooking it together. She plants me a big fat kiss.

  “This was only foreplay,” she says. “Who knows what can happen next time?”

  I escort her back to her zone and think I’m in the clear but here I am at the Wild Cherries, just passing by and here’s Howard Glass, as usual, and he’s giving me the evil eye, with that grin. He nods me over. I keep to my pace, my eyes fixed toward destiny, but as I’m walking and picking up speed I hear him say, “You’re not so terrific anymore, are you, big shot!” I am not the only one who hears this.

  Much later, when it’s mostly me and Mark on the floor down by the big glass doors, where only a few Asians remain half-awake waiting for the bus to Chinatown, I tell him first about a party I’m forced to attend at my wife’s insistence, second about Franco, to which Mark says the usual, don’t trust anybody. “I warned you.”

  Then, since we share practically everything, I confide about Carmella.

  Mark says, “We’re married. We’re not neutered.”

  The only reason
I consented to the party was because there was good news. Sylvio had phoned to say that there was another publisher he was looking into and, separately, he was having lunch with Roe Morgan and “we ain’t dead yet.” Roe Morgan was after a certain hot young writer in Sylvio’s stable, so maybe some deal could be arranged, with me thrown into the bargain. Not the most flashy way to get published, but what the hell! Anyway, that’s the good news. I’m easy. Doesn’t take much to keep me going.

  So I’m all set for the party that Melanie has browbeaten me into attending, a party of fellow book reviewers and literary types and artistic types gathering in Haddonfield. Melanie does not like the expression on my puss as we’re getting dressed and as she keeps making me change outfits as green doesn’t go with blue and blue doesn’t go with orange and orange doesn’t go with yellow and that whole business that turns her into a wardrobe terrorist. As for her, it’s magical what she turns into when she gets all dolled up. She ought to be in pictures. She knows it, too. I did get lucky on this score. On this score, I did.

  She doesn’t like my attitude even as we’re driving along. I cuss out every red light. She says it’s not personal, red traffic lights. I say it is. It’s a sign from God. She gasps when I gun the engine and proceed on yellows. She doesn’t understand. That’s the way we drive. She doesn’t understand that every car on the road, every driver, is an enemy. They’re all in the way. Anyhow, she doesn’t like my attitude. “These are your people,” she says about the people at the party.

  “No they’re not. They’re frauds.”

  “They’re not frauds.”

  “They’re sensitive people.”

  “That they are and what’s wrong with that?” she demands.

  “I don’t cotton to sensitive people.”

  “You’re sensitive.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “I wish you’d stop this.”

  “I hate writers most of all. Is there anyone more self-centered?”

  “Well you’re not.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m a bust. I am non-essential personnel.”

  “You’re what?” she says.

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh stop this! What’s gotten into you?”

  “Don’t pay attention to me.”

  “You prefer to be walking around in that green casino uniform?”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Please,” she says.

  “They’re Starbucks people, these people of yours. I’m a Dunkin Donuts kind of guy.”

  “You just hate parties.”

  This becomes even more apparent at the party, hosted by Gladdy (Gladys) Parker, queen of Haddonfield Society. Haddonfield prides itself in its Americana quaintness, its Colonial and Quaker history, and in its lively devotion to the Arts. More than 60 percent of Haddonfield’s adult residents are college graduates and about the same percentage are millionaires, old money mostly. The speed limit is 15 mph and pedestrians always have the right of way. Driving is considered rude. People promenade. Victorian and Colonial homes and Boutique shops and outdoor cafes charm the main roads and the side streets and there is no crime. No crime. No burglaries, no rapes, no murders. Zero. (Five minutes away is Camden, New Jersey, which is annually cited as the most UN-livable and dangerous city in America.)

  Sheldon Parker, Gladdy’s husband, made his wealth on Wall Street and brought it back here in a place that honors its actors (The Haddonfield Plays and Players), its musicians (The Haddonfield Symphony), its painters, its sculptors and even its writers. That’s who’s here this evening, illuminated by the romance of true 19th century candlelight, the whole crew of them gathered pell mell in Gladdy’s parlor, the length of a football field starting at the 50-yard line, carpet so thick that short people are in peril. Here, in this Victorian palace on Tanner Street, off Kings Highway, where actual kings of Europe once traveled, everything that glitters IS gold.

  A few business types are sipping martinis, but the rest are artists or from the artistic community.

  The women, generally, are too rich and too thin, and the men, of artistic persuasion, walk around like Byron or Chopin.

  Melanie is greeted, hug hug kiss kiss, like everybody’s favorite, and I’m here, too. I’m not eyeing the exit, as Melanie threatened me against, but I am casing the joint for a quiet corner to camouflage myself. Melanie, though, has me mixing and mingling. I never know how to disengage, politely, once a conversation has run its course and turned back to the weather. This is always a problem, how to tell a person look, it’s over, you’re boring me and I’m boring you, so let’s move on to other people so that we can get bored all over again.

  (At the casino, you fix the lady’s machine, and it’s done.)

  Melanie walks me, like a delinquent, from gathering to gathering, all of it artsy and literary, and whispers, “You ought to love this. Grouch.”

  “It’s all about flirting and boozing.”

  “Oh shush.”

  “It’s about mating up. It’s about adultery.”

  I had just read something about the King James Bible, how it went through so many disreputable changes that one version, called the Wicked Bible, forgot one word in the command “Though shalt not commit adultery.” The forgotten word was not. Apparently that was good enough for entire generations even up to this minute: Thou shalt commit adultery.

  I do bring this up at one of the gatherings and am marked as witty. Witty is good, and Melanie is pleased. I’m behaving.

  “You can be so charming,” she whispers, “when you want.”

  I spy a bedroom with a TV set showing, oh my gawd, Lawrence of Arabia, and figure this to be my resting place for the night, but Gladdy intercepts and asks me what I’m working on these days. I say, “Nothing.” She laughs. I am so witty. “No, seriously. Don’t be coy. What’s the new novel all about?”

  “There is no new novel.”

  Melanie jumps in before this can get any worse.

  “Oh, Jay. Stop being so modest. Jay is always at work on his next, Gladdy. In fact, his agent…”

  “Will it be as big as…”

  “Bigger,” says Mel.

  Gladdy never saw the movie, but she had read the book, The Ice King. This gives her points. I can never dislike her.

  But it does get worse, for here comes Felix Grubner, novelist, essayist, literary man-about-town, escorted by a phalanx of his worshipers. I don’t know how people get TWO Ph.Ds, but he’s got them, both, and it’s astonishing. He gets fellowships and gives lectures and some university has named a chair after him. The problem began when we were both reviewed in a single review in the Philadelphia Journal when The Ice King came out from me, and something else from him. So what it really amounted to was my novel against his, and I won, and he never forgave me, as if I had anything to do with the write-up.

  I found out later that he actually contacted the Journal to have them do a check as to whether I was related to the reviewer.

  Fortunately, for him, for Felix, he succeeded thereafter, or so he keeps reminding his many fans. Truly, he is a success, though his wife seems never to be at his side, and when she is, she comes with a sour expression, exasperated, as if she’s heard it all before, everything he has to say. Maybe they get along, I don’t know, but I do not envy him in that department.

  “Well, well, well,” he says, extending a handshake.

  “Good to see you Felix.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Around.”

  “Here, there and everywhere, huh?”

  “Most likely.”

  We get to talking about his latest essay in the National something-or-other, in which he claimed that America’s great failure is that its people are so parochial, so local. “We have no cosmopolitan wits,” he wrote in that article and repeats again now. We lack gravitas. I explain that it’s exactly that, our love of silliness that makes us great.

  “We don’t do angst,” I’m trying to say against his smugness.

  “Maybe we s
hould,” he says smiling that academic smile.

  “We don’t do weltschmerz, Felix. They weltschmerz. We romp. They gave us Hitler and Mussolini. We came up with Bob Hope and Jack Benny.”

  “Oh,” he laughs, “yes, we gave the world the hula hoop.”

  “Also, Felix, the cure for polio.”

  “I understand you have a secret project in the works,” Felix says, quickly onto something else.

  “He simply won’t tell,” says Gladdy.

  “Very secret,” I say.

  I refuse to name a novel in progress, for the whammy, and for the fact that a novel in progress is not a novel. Talking a novel, a novel that hasn’t been codified as yet, is bad manners unless, of course, it’s part of a class. Besides, there is no sense talking about anything that hasn’t happened yet. It is bad luck to congratulate a mere pregnancy.

  “In development” is another word, or words, for hell.

  “Oh, very secret,” Felix says theatrically.

  “The mark of a true artist,” someone says, one of his people.

  Funny, I never think of myself as an artist. A writer, okay. I just don’t get artist. In my neighborhood they used to beat people up for less.

  You did not want to be seen carrying a violin across the football field, in my neighborhood.

  That’s what artist means to me: A kid carrying a violin across a football field.

  So now it’s time for Felix to give us the scoop on what’s been going on with him, the prizes he’s won for his books and commentaries, the honorable mentions in The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the praises from academics as near as Columbia and as far as Oxford. He still has that chair named for him some place.

  There are more than a dozen of his devotees listening in, awestruck or merely tipsy.

  Melanie is not liking this.

  She makes it clear that my one book got itself translated into 26 different languages, that its moral dilemma has sparked academic papers in more than a hundred universities…

  “Then came the movie,” says Felix, and it is plain what he means.

  “But you didn’t write the screenplay,” says Gladdy, addressing me and defending me.

  “No he didn’t,” says Mel, further defending me, her husband the author.

  “What if I did,” I snap. “I liked the movie.” (I did, even though the screenplay was quite ordinary, as was the screenwriter herself.)