Slot Attendant

by Jack Engelhard

  Toledo is neglecting his zone, but there’s more on his mind.

  “Something’s really bugging me,” he says. “It’s really bugging me.”

  I know what it is. I’m pretty sure.

  “We all have our secrets.”

  “Mine is too big to carry alone,” he says.

  What a strange thing to say! Almost biblical. Mine is too big to carry alone.

  “Tell your girl, tell Maria,” I advise.

  “Are you kidding?”

  Chapter 11

  Melanie is relieved that it isn’t me, or probably isn’t me.

  “Maybe,” she says, “it’s something else he wanted to talk about.”

  “I know what he wanted to talk about.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “No.”

  “Instinct?”

  “Look, I know.”

  I’ve taken another sick day. That won’t favor me when it comes to my performance evaluation. But I’ve got to get regular and I’ve got to get some sleep, real sleep. I’ve been reading stories about how dangerous it is otherwise. People need sleep. Anything less than eight hours a night, said the article, is dangerous. Eight hours a night? Are you kidding? For more than a year I’ve been subsisting on one hour a day. I am going to kill those pigeons. One night, or one day, I will kill all those pigeons. I will try to sleep without a pill. We shall see.

  But here’s the good part about being up by night and in a fog by day. You hardly read a newspaper and hardly watch TV, the news. You don’t know what’s going on.

  That’s a blessing.

  In the world of publishing, Judith Regan of Regan Books, says that she’s had “amazing sex,” but it wasn’t with me, so what do I care.

  So I’m not current.

  When I was in newspapering I was current to the minute. I needed the news and the news needed me.

  Well that’s how it is anyway, when you’re on graveyard. There is no news. Nothing is happening. No wars, no politics, nothing.

  You’ve missed everything and you’ve missed nothing.

  (Up in the cafeteria the TV is all sports or sitcoms and when there’s news, it’s Spanish.)

  Rumor has it that there’s a recession going on. Slot attendants, like me, keep paying jackpots and fixing hopper jams. The place is full. How come? What recession?

  Melanie is at the computer fiddling with a book review. She’s biting her nails. She’s reluctant to write something bad about a bad book. Her mind has been preoccupied with her father in Cincinnati, who’s had a bypass. He’s recuperating all right, and her mother insists that everything is fine, but Melanie thinks we should make the trip, which we cannot afford to do, by car or by plane, and anyway, by the time we got there we’d be ready to head back. I cannot keep taking sick days and…we are saving my vacation days for New York, when it’s time to celebrate the signing of a book contract.

  Day to day we are prepared to celebrate, not me so much, but Melanie, who’s the optimist, still the optimist.

  Lucky we’re one of each as I’d hate to imagine two pessimists in the same family.

  “I think,” she says, “you did wisely.”

  We’re onto Toledo and what I’m not supposed to know about him but I do. That maybe he is a thief. “You never want to become an informer,” she says.

  I’m glad she agrees, but then she adds:

  “I just keep wondering what you’re doing in that world anyway.”

  Like it or not, I say, it is my world.

  Melanie has given up on the computer. She leans back and sighs, rubs her eyes.

  “I can’t write a bad review,” she says.

  “So write a good one.”

  “Can’t do that, either.”

  We drive over to the McDonald’s. It’s that or meatloaf. So it’s McDonald’s. They don’t heat these places. I think I know why. They want you in and out.

  We find a table that’s clean except for two crumbs. No table at McDonald’s is ever totally clean. There’s always two crumbs.

  She brings me a double cheeseburger, medium fries and a coke. She’s having the chicken sandwich and a diet coke.

  She doesn’t need to diet, but she does. Not really, but she is temperate. She is temperate in food and in everything else. She does not have mood swings. Though lately…

  “The fries are cold.”

  “Cold,” she asks, “or just not hot enough?”

  “Not hot enough.”

  “Should I take them back?”

  “Never mind.”

  We sit there and munch. I stare out the window when I’m done. I’m a quick eater. I gulp it down. She’s still eating. I wish there was something good to say.

  Things could be worse, or, as my Russian self-defense master, Boris, keeps saying, things should never be better. That’s considered a blessing where he comes from. Things should never be better. That’s how you bless someone. You have to think about this before it sinks in. So we’re sitting here and enjoying that roundtable up a few rows where the old-timers have gathered. All McDonald’s are alike except that each table is its own universe. They’re always here, a group of old men, retirees and most probably widowers, at the same table, gabbing away, swapping tales, usually about the wars they’ve fought in and how everything has changed, and this usually starts an argument, some saying that it was better before and others insisting that now is the best time of all, and how special it is just to be alive. They’re always here from visit to visit and it’s all very pleasant – although, given that these are mostly World War Two vets, and Korea, there’s usually one of them missing, never to be seen again – another empty chair.

  Melanie always smiles just to be watching them.

  She brings back chocolate chip cookies from the counter, which is an extravagance but always a treat and more than that, somehow comforting, a signal that everything’s going to be all right. She reminds me that there is still hope from Sylvio. Much hope. I don’t tell her that you can’t live off hope and can’t live off the next phone call that may not even come. But she knows what I’m thinking.

  “I think it’s time to phone Lindy,” she says.

  Lindy is my sister, older by a few years, and it’s a long story about her, but the short of it is that she is still quite gorgeous but refused to trade that in for acting and went for song writing instead, that, plus developing new shows for TV, the stage, and the movies. She’s always had more creativity and talent than she knew what to do with, but it all went kaput when she came up with an idea for a children’s show, and it got ripped off. They bought the project, except that they never gave her the money, or the credit, and the show became the biggest thing on the air…and still is. Walking in, she knew nothing about agents or lawyers and how to protect herself.

  So after all that, and cured of ambition, she moved back to Montreal and became religious, though with ties to no particular religion…and not hypocritically pious. She has recovered and become quite strong. Now she teaches. She teaches Inspiration and Motivation and has quite a following. When she calls, or when I phone her, she always tells me to bless everything.

  “I think I will call her,” I tell Melanie over another cup of coffee along with the chocolate chip cookies.

  “I think you should,” says Melanie. “You need a good pep talk.”

  We glance over at the kid who mops the floor and tidies up here at McDonald’s. He’s disabled, and severely so, walks on one good leg and there is something wrong with his face. He never talks to anyone and no one talks to him. Melanie always tips him two dollars. We watch him, Melanie and I, and we don’t have to say what we’re thinking, but I wonder if he is blessed, or thinks he’s blessed.

  I see blessings and curses every day in the casino.

  She says, “You are doing the right thing, aren’t you? About that kid.”

  “Toledo? Of course.”

  She says she’s worried. “Suppose you were forced to talk?”

  “I’d have nothing to say.”


  “But you know what he did. You know it’s him.”

  “I’d never talk, Melanie. That’s the first rule of the schoolyard.”

  “But this isn’t the schoolyard. You were talking to a real detective.”

  “I’m no snitch, Mel.”

  “Listen to your language. You’re starting to talk just like them.”

  “Snitch?”

  “Isn’t that how they talk?”

  “Well, it certainly ain’t how Felix Grubner talks with his two Ph.Ds. Anyway, you’re so big on multiculturalism.”

  “Not when you bring it home,” she says smiling, because she knows how I tease her about being such a flaming liberal. I can be a liberal, too, but I once got in trouble with her group in Haddonfield when, after another suicide bombing in that other part of the world, I said, “Can you be called a bigot if by their words and deeds they turn you into one?” That is no way to make friends and influence people; not in Haddonfield.

  “Do you know how serious this is?” she says as we’re finishing up here at McDonald’s where, for some reason, I feel a sense of comfort. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to go home. Home is where the pigeons live. I particularly like Melanie’s dad, a true, red-blooded Cincinnatian. I love his story about how the pigeons took over Fountain Square and, once a year, the citizens were allowed, even invited, to shoot them. I am not that kind of person, but about pigeons, yes. Anyway, I think pigeon shooting has been stopped in Cincinnati. Because of her dad, I root for the Reds, and he has plenty of stories about them, too, as he goes back to the days of Wally Post, Gus Bell, and most of all, Big Klu. A part of Cincinnati is hillbilly country, as it sits next door to Kentucky, and her dad always tells the joke about the hillbilly who refused to marry a virgin “cause if she ain’t good enough for her own kin, she ain’t good enough for me.” This cracks him up, and me, too. I am also afraid of home because that’s where the bills come, and the phone calls.

  “So do you?” Melanie says. “Do you realize how serious this is?”

  “I’ve been told. The detective told me.”

  “But you still wouldn’t…snitch.”

  “Come on, Mel. Would you want me to?”

  She’s thinking.

  “No, I guess not,” she says. “No, that wouldn’t be right.”

  I explain that, besides the ethics, I am a hero to Toledo Vasquez. As I am no hero to Roe Morgan and the rest of them, I am a hero to Toledo Vasquez. That counts.

  “But what if it’s a choice between you and him?”

  “One step at a time.”

  “Could you go to jail? My God!”

  “But you’re with me on this.”

  “Yes. I guess.”

  “You guess.”

  She thinks I’m being awfully flippant about this business. But, I explain, there is nothing worse than an informer, or hardly anything.

  “How bad can this get?” she asks.

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “No. Maybe.”

  She is still suspicious that I may be involved, considering all those tips I bring home. Are they really tips?

  How is it that when she sends me off saying we need a hundred and fifty dollars for the phone bill, the next morning I bring home a hundred and fifty dollars?

  Chapter 12

  We drive back from McDonald’s and as I pull up to the house I tell her I’m going for a drive. I need to air out. She understands and says she’s sorry for being so tough on me, and lately, doesn’t it seem, she says, that we’re always quarrelling? Not exactly quarrelling, but at odds. It has been difficult, I agree, but, she says, we do love each other, don’t we? Of course we do.

  Because without that…

  I know…

  She sends me off saying, “Pleasant thoughts. Think about Sylvio and what he said.”

  Yes, he said we’re alive, still alive. There’s another publisher, and even Roe Morgan. Even Roe Morgan is still alive.

  As I drive off I’m remembering what he said – No Thanks. You will always remember that, from Roe Morgan or from anybody. I have been rejected a thousand times, as every writer has, but I’ve never had No Thanks. That’s heavy, near unforgivable. But forget I will, if it comes to that, for that’s life. Better a live dog than a dead lion. I always hated that expression. But I was young. So, maybe Sylvio can still turn it around, hot agent that he is; never loses a patient, right? So will I forgive? No, never. But I will take the money. Integrity is a fine thing, but it comes in second to the rent.

  For some reason I think back to my three minutes of fame on the Today show when The Ice King was so hot. That’s all I got, three minutes, and it was a blur then and it’s still a blur. A limo picked me up five in the morning from The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, dropped me off at the studio, someone put some make-up on me, and I was on, though I couldn’t see Matt Lauer, though he could see me, and so could the rest of America. That’s a bit of a disadvantage when you can’t see who you’re talking to, how he’s reacting. I was told by my publicist to smile and keep on smiling, which I did, and that was stupid. I’ll never do that again. You look so stupid when you just keep on smiling. So I’m asked a few questions, and I answer, I guess, but it doesn’t seem to come out right, from my side, and I wish I had more time, but this is television and there are commercials and other guests to do. Television is not a writer’s medium, certainly no place for a novelist, as novelists do not think in sentences or sound bites. Novelists think in paragraphs.

  Writers should not be out there selling their books, anyway. That’s why God invented salesmen. Your job is to write and shut up.

  I wonder, as I drive, if my marriage is in jeopardy. We said we love each other. We hardly ever say that because it is so understood. So why now? I know about me, my weaknesses, my temptations, but not about Melanie’s, though I have had a suspicion or two. There’d been those late lunches with Harold Fermont, the writer, and once she’d even confessed to a schoolgirl crush – “who wouldn’t?” Yes, the ladies of Haddonfield swoon for Harold Fermont – “who wouldn’t?” I don’t know if anything happened. I don’t want to know. Maybe I do, but better I don’t. No, we are happily married.

  Or maybe I’ve been jealous and continue to be jealous because he’s successful and I’m not. I used to be, but not anymore.

  (At the outset she wanted to do the “let’s have no secrets between us” thing – where couples confide about everything from the first crush onward. I was opposed to this. This, I argued, is an album better left closed. She finally agreed, though she is big on masturbation, admits to indulging for the release and the therapy. I never ask how often she does it, or who she has in mind when she does it, but I imagine it’s quite frequent and would rather not know the rest, like who’s the guy in the picture. She claims that “everybody does it” and this is true. Masters and Johnson, and others, did the research and even without all that research it is still true.)

  Poverty does strange things. We’re not poor. Together we’re sort of, almost, making it, enough, even, to fake it, but we barely rate as middle class, except for the public face we put on, largely through her doing, and she is so good at it that for all appearances we’re hugely successful. But six years now without a novel, yes, is it about the same as going 84 days without taking a fish? The thought of losing her never occurred to me, until she said she loved me.

  I only hope Toledo has stopped doing what he’s doing. I did not want to scare her, but this is very serious. Something has got to give. There is going to be trouble. They did not bring in those guys, those outside guys, for nothing. They are on to Toledo and who else? Who knows? Are they onto me for something?

  If it really is Toledo, can you blame him? Of course you can, except that he’s got a girl he wants to marry, a house she wants him to buy, a snazzy car she wants him to lease – and all that at $8.25 an hour? No can do. In the old days, the Vegas days, they took you out back, broke your legs or chopped off your
hands.

  They don’t do that now, but maybe what they do is even worse. I know what they do. I’d seen it done. What they do is parade you out in handcuffs. They do it for show, as a warning to others. See, this is what happens when you cheat and get caught. Take note. That’s the message – and everybody gets caught. There’s that eye in the sky. God is watching.

  The problem for Melanie – I think I know what it is. Suppose I get nabbed, for being directly or indirectly responsible, and suppose it hits the papers and makes a scandal? How will this go over in Haddonfield? Nothing wrong with a big scandal, a literary spat, like Truman Capote vs. Jack Kerouac (“that’s not writing, that’s typing”) or Mailer knifing his wife, or Mailer, John Irving and John Updike ganging up on Tom Wolfe (that’s not literature, that’s entertainment); or even a journalistic scandal will do, like reporter Jayson Blair who nearly brought down the House That Ochs Built. Big scandals are good. People write books about them, and become even more in demand, even more popular.

  But a puny scandal is not good. Slot attendant scandals do not translate into television or into movies.

  Maybe it’s time to go for a job that pays really big. I met this guy in the casino who made a fortune dubbing voices for the movies (looping), when they switch to TV and the F-word has to be replaced. He got rich changing F-You to Forget You. But he had the right voice. I don’t. Amazing how people get rich. Like the hula-hoop, the pet rock, the intermittent windshield wiper. Amazing.

  I’m driving and I know where I’m going, but I’m a bit lost. There used to be small farms around here, horses, cows. I used to drive past a place near our house that always had a horse tethered out front, grazing away. The sight of that horse made me feel good, still country. But all that’s changed or changing and fast. The horse is gone and so is the farm. So are most of the farms. It’s all being developed. Mostly condos (as what’s happening to our apartment) and strip malls. When Starbucks comes, horses go.

  I pull into the Wal-Mart strip mall and park in front of the sign that reads, “Boris Russian Martial Arts Center.” I know Boris, but it’s been a while. He’s got a third degree Black Belt. Mine is second degree. Boris used to be part of the Russian Mob that came to America after the Soviet Union became simply Russia. He quit. He quit the mob, went straight and opened this business, martial arts, of which he’d been the leading expert in Moscow. People came to him from all over to learn his secrets, and still do. He taught the Soviet Army, which is not necessarily a high compliment, considering what we know these days, but he also taught the Israeli Army, and that is a high compliment.