4
Laoshi
An elder teacher, sage, and role model who has devoted his life to knowledge and wisdom.
Job hunting was not going well. Employers were letting go of holiday staff in the early days of January, not hiring new people. I filled out applications online and in person. I applied at restaurants, retail stores, and temp agencies. I answered employment ads and looked for signs in windows. Some places with “Help Wanted” signs posted told me that those notices were left over from last month and should really be taken down.
“Gee, y’think?” I muttered.
Other places said they just weren’t hiring. “It’s the economy,” they’d tell me with a resigned shrug.
Some places had already filled the positions I inquired about. With so many people looking for work these days, I supposed this wasn’t surprising.
While overpaid politicians with self-righteous smirks and media pundits with patent-leather hair, all of whom had enjoyed paid holidays last week, daily shrieked insults into TV cameras about the lazy, no-good, leeching poor and unemployed of America, I skidded across icy pavements and waded through ankle deep slush each day, looking for work.
Every morning, I left my apartment around nine o’clock, after mixing my breakfast smoothie from a discount container of nonfat yogurt and a bag of fruit I’d found at the back of my now-empty freezer. For thirty minutes each afternoon, I’d “grab lunch” by pretending to be a shopper at the upscale food emporiums where they handed out free samples. At night, I’d get home around nine o’clock and heat up some beans and rice for dinner.
Naturally, during my darkest moment one evening, when I was morosely wondering if I’d ever work again at all, let alone as an actress, my mother called.
She has an uncanny ability to sense when I am at my lowest and immediately phone me. And then she manages to make me feel even worse. It’s her gift.
“You should have known better than to work for a criminal organization,” she said after I explained as briefly and vaguely as possible what had happened to my job.
In other words, it was my fault that I was out of work now.
I tried to change the subject by asking a few questions about things in my parents’ lives back in Madison, Wisconsin, where I’d been raised. My father is a history professor at the university, and my mother is a youth employment counselor. They’re active in the local community and bedrock members of their synagogue.
But my mother was not to be thwarted in her efforts to find out just how bad things were going here.
“So you haven’t had an audition lately?” she asked. “Not any at all? None?”
“No, Mom, not for a month. Things have been slow.”
She decided to send me money. I declined the offer with thanks—sincere thanks, in fact.
My parents didn’t understand my lifestyle; but, to give them credit, they loved me anyhow, and they didn’t fight me on my choices. My mother was critical and my father was bewildered, but they had recognized me as a mystery child many years ago, as someone who’d been born into their family via some cosmic joke, and they had decided to accept it. (Jews are good at enduring. Not silent about it, but good at it.)
My only sibling, Ruth, was four years older, and she was much more the sort of person they had expected to raise. Married to a Jewish lawyer in Chicago, she was a professional woman with two small children and a good salary. (She was also invariably so stressed out that on the few occasions I saw her, I always had the jitters for days afterward.)
I appreciated that despite their not understanding me—and despite their phone calls not always being a source of undiluted joy for me—my parents accepted that I had chosen this path in life and was committed to it. They tried, in their way, to be supportive and show an interest in my work.
And I had always felt that my obligation in our silent pact, since life is a two-way street, was not to trouble them with the problems that inevitably arose from this lifestyle. I knew they wouldn’t mind sending me money now and then; but I thought it just didn’t seem right to ask or accept. It somehow felt a bit like asking to them help me cover the cost of converting to Christianity and getting baptized. (Well, without the hysterical threats of self-immolation that my mother would immediately start shrieking in such a situation.)
Accepting money from them might also open the door to their suggesting that I should think about quitting this life, and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with them. Partly because acting isn’t just what I do; it’s who I am. I’ll never give it up. And partly because that’s just too painful and irrational a conversation to have when you can’t afford to eat, let alone pay your rent.
So when my mom pressed me, obviously worried about my circumstances, I lied and pretended I had enough money to get by for a while. Then I changed the subject again and asked how my father’s recent speech had gone at a big conference. My mother told me about it, and I could hear my father in the background, interrupting repeatedly to correct her and provide additional details.
I smiled. My dad never really knew what to say to me, so he seldom got on the phone with me. Instead, he hovered annoyingly around my mother when she called me, so he could listen and keep interjecting the whole while. It was his way of visiting with me, and it suited us both.
After we finished discussing my father’s news, my mother turned the conversation back to me by asking whether I was seeing someone special.
“No, there’s no one,” I said, not even flinching. I had expected the question. She always asked.
I ended the call a few minutes later, after turning down one more offer to send me money.
Then I did some mental calculations, working out exactly how bad things were. I still had a little cash left over from my interrupted New Year’s Eve shift at Stella’s, but it wouldn’t last much longer, despite my careful hoarding.
However, on the bright side, at least I didn’t have to tell my mother I was involved with an Irish-Cuban cop who’d been raised Catholic. Lopez seemed open-minded about religion, but nonetheless faithful to his own; I knew he attended Mass every week. There was no way I could pretend to my mother he might convert.
So it was just as well he and I weren’t dating. If we were, I’d have to listen to my mother fret about how we’d raise the children.
Besides, his mother hated me. I’d met Lopez’s parents while I was working as an elf at Fenster & Co. And even when I thought about it long and hard, I couldn’t imagine how that encounter could have gone any worse. Not without gunplay, anyhow.
So maybe he and I just weren’t ever really meant to . . .
Oh, forget about him, would you? After all, you’re starving because of him!
Every time I found myself thinking of Lopez, I tried to focus on how angry I was at him for shutting down Bella Stella. If he hadn’t done that, I’d have a job right now. I’d be able to buy groceries, pay for utilities, and save toward next month’s rent.
Being so angry at him about that kept things simple for me. And with our relationship in tatters, my career going nowhere, and financial collapse looming directly over my head, I needed things to be simple. Thinking about the way he had treated me . . . Well, that generated feelings too complicated and powerful for me to cope with while my life was in such dire shape. So I just tried not to think about it. Not now.
I regrouped after my mother’s phone call by reviewing practical matters. Stella Butera had been released on bail, as expected. Based on her attorney’s advice, she was lying low and not talking to anyone. Some of the Gambellos who were arrested that night were considered serious flight risks and were still in custody, including Tommy Two Toes and Ronnie Romano; others had been released after posting hefty bails and surrendering their passports.
I still didn’t know where Lucky was. Which I assumed meant the cops didn’t know, either. The bust at Bella Stella was high
-profile, OCCB had made additional Gambello arrests since then, and Lucky was too well-known a figure for his arrest to go unreported; but when I checked the news each day, there was no mention of him.
I didn’t kid myself about what kind of life Lucky had led, and I could only guess at how much trouble he was in, now that OCCB was really cracking down on the Gambello family. But that didn’t change the fact that I was attached to him—and, indeed, had trusted him with my life, more than once, in very dangerous circumstances. I knew he was a survivor, so I wasn’t exactly worried about him as the days passed without any word, but I was a little anxious. I also knew that even if he was still using the phone number I had for him, which seemed very unlikely, I shouldn’t call him. Lopez knew that Lucky and I were friends, which meant that OCCB knew. So it would probably be safer for Lucky if I didn’t try to contact him.
Safer for me, too, I thought, recalling Napoli’s ire when he’d ordered Lopez to arrest me. Detective Charm would really sink his hooks into me if he found evidence that I was phoning the old hit man whom OCCB was hunting.
And that’s how things still stood the following afternoon, some five days after Lucky escaped arrest. I was coming out of yet another restaurant where I’d filed a job application when my cell phone rang. An icy wind whipped down the street as I fumbled in my pocket for it, my heart giving a little leap. Even as I peered at the LCD readout to see who was calling, I was mentally kicking myself for hoping it would be Lopez.
Stop thinking about him, would you?
“Ah!” My heart gave a little leap, anyhow, when I saw who my caller was. My agent was finally getting back to me. I put the phone to my ear and said, “Thack! How was Wisconsin?”
Thackeray Shackleton (not his real name) was from Oshkosh, a town in my native state; like me, he had moved to the Big Apple after college. We had met here three years ago, when I was seeking competent representation (which is not so easy to find in my profession). A Lithuanian-American, he came from a long line of hereditary vampires—reputedly descended from Gediminas himself, the medieval Lithuanian warrior-king who’d started that whole thing. But Thack was mostly a non-practicing vampire; a debonair gay man who wore tailored suits and was first in line to try every new fusion food fad, he was much more comfortable in his adopted lifestyle as a New York theatrical agent, bon vivant, and man-about-uptown. And he hated visiting his family in Wisconsin, so I expected him to be in a sour mood. But he surprised me.
“Not as bad as I expected,” he said. “The family’s pleased with me for stepping up to the plate—sort of—during that whole crazed-Lithuanian-vampire-serial-killer mess that you and Max got me mixed up in this fall.”
“Oh, like it’s my fault when your people turn bad,” I said.
He ignored that. “Even so, there was, as usual, more ritual drinking of human blood in honor of Christmas than I care for. So please remind me not to visit my family for about five years.” I had gathered that Thack’s family was fairly casual about their Catholicism but pretty rigid about their vampire traditions. He continued, “And although we didn’t fight, there was just enough familial tension that I wanted to kiss the ground when I landed at LaGuardia.”
“Eeuw,” I said. “You really don’t want to kiss the ground there.”
“Anyhow, I’ve checked my messages and caught up on your news. I’m sorry to hear about Bella Stella, though I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. And, really, I’ve been anxious about your working there ever since that Gambello capo got shot dead at his dinner table while you were serving him.”
“But the tips were good there,” I said morosely. “And I am so broke, Thack.”
“I’m afraid there’s not much going on right now,” he said apologetically. “I was hoping things would pick up once the holidays were over, but it’s still slow. It’s the economy, I guess.”
“I’m so tired of hearing that,” I said crankily.
“But there are a few rumblings from Crime and Punishment,” he added. “They’d still like to find the right spot for you.”
The New York-based C&P empire of prestigious TV police dramas had a lot of money and a lot of weekly shows to cast—Crime and Punishment (the flagship program), Criminal Motive, Street Unit, and The Dirty Thirty. I had done a couple of very minor roles for C&P, and then this past summer, I had been cast in a juicy part on The Dirty Thirty (affectionately known to fans as D30), the production company’s most controversial show. I’d played Jilly C-Note (not her real name), a homeless bisexual junkie prostitute suspected of killing her pimp. Although they had no solid evidence against Jilly for that murder, the morally bankrupt cops of the corrupt Thirtieth Precinct pressured her over that crime in order to pump her for information about other criminal activity. One of the detectives also used Jilly for sex.
Cops hated D30. Lopez could barely even choke out the show’s name, he loathed it so much.
Nonetheless, that was a powerful episode in an overall strong show with great writing and talented actors. But my role had been unexpectedly reduced after Mike Nolan, the actor with whom I’d had most of my scenes, suffered two heart attacks before the episode was completed. My character got dropped out of the replacement scenes that were hastily written to cover his absence. When it became clear after the second heart attack that Nolan wouldn’t be coming back for a few months, the rewrites included having his character suddenly shot twice, off-screen, and being hospitalized indefinitely. Since then, Nolan had only appeared a few times on D30, always in brief scenes where his character was lying in a hospital bed.
I had worked well with the cast and crew of D30, and the C&P people kept saying they felt bad about cutting down my part so much as a result of circumstances. They told Thack they’d find something for me on one of their shows, to make it up to me.
I appreciated this; but I’d read for two C&P roles in late November, hadn’t been cast in either of them, and there had been nothing from them since then but vague “rumblings.” So I wasn’t enthused when Thack now said that they were rumbling once again.
“I need something more concrete than that, Thack,” I said. “I need an audition. A reading. I need to be cast. I need income.”
“I will goose them and see if I can’t get something more than a rumble,” he promised. “Meanwhile, I’ve got my ear to the ground, my hand on the phone, my nose to the wind. Hang in there.”
“Hmph.”
The gunmetal gray sky opened up and started sleeting soon after I ended our phone call. The wet, frigid, windy downpour soaked my coat, streaked my daypack with rivulets of melting ice, and made my teeth chatter. Although I really needed to keep looking for gainful employment, I was just too cold, tired, hungry, and discouraged to stick with it any longer today. It was only late afternoon now, but I decided to call it quits. Tomorrow was another day, after all.
Greenwich Village was my job-hunting territory today, so I decided to walk over to my friend Max’s place and fling myself on his mercy. He would give me a cup of hot tea and seat me by his little gas fire so I could thaw out.
Zadok’s Rare & Used Books was on a quiet side street in the West Village. A specialty store for occult books, it didn’t get much foot traffic, but it had a devoted clientele. If its proprietor, Dr. Maximillian Zadok, were a more engaged businessman, he’d get online, since his store was well stocked with rare and exotic volumes, and he’d probably do brisk business on the internet. But the store was sort of a modestly paying hobby for Max, or a cover story. His real work was confronting Evil in New York City, as the local representative of the Magnum Collegium, an old, revered, and extremely obscure worldwide organization.
Gifted with mystical mojo and supernatural talents (though he always insisted the word “supernatural” was inaccurate), Max had first befriended me when I was in danger of becoming the next victim in a series of magical vanishings aimed at (as we eventually discovered) securing a human sacrifice
to use for summoning a people-eating, power-granting demon. Since then, Max and I had helped each other resolve additional sticky problems that arose when Evil intruded, demons were summoned, dark gods were bribed, and dimensions rubbed each other the wrong way.
People just got up to all kinds of dangerous shit in this city. Sometimes it was almost enough to make a starving actress think about moving to Los Angeles. (At the moment, though, I’d be hard-pressed to scrape together cab fare to Harlem, never mind a ticket to the West Coast.)
Anyhow, what with one thing and another, Max had become a cherished and trusted friend—and exactly the right person to cheer me up when I was feeling so low. I should have come to the bookstore before now, I realized, as I entered the old townhouse where the shop resided. Max and I hadn’t seen each other since Christmas Day, which I had spent here.
“Hello?” I called. “Max?”
On a wet, cold, dreary day in early January, I wasn’t surprised to find the shop apparently empty of customers.
“Esther? Is that you?” he replied from somewhere in the book stacks.
“Woof!” A dog the size of a small horse came trotting across the floor to greet me.
“Hello, Nelli.” I patted her head and then pulled gently on her immense floppy ears. Excited to see me, she bounded around a little and batted me playfully with her paws, nearly knocking me over.
Nelli was Max’s mystical familiar. She had emerged from another dimension in response to his summons for assistance in fighting Evil—after his apprentice from the Magnum Collegium hadn’t worked out, what with plotting to mystically murder much of Manhattan and ruthlessly rule whoever was still left standing.
Whatever mysterious powers had helped Nelli assume canine form so she could pursue her noble mission in this dimension, they evidently hadn’t realized how crowded New York is. She was an inconveniently large animal for such close quarters. Trying to transport Nelli from one area of the city to another had been a logistical nightmare until Max recently developed a relationship with a pet-transport service that had a vehicle big enough to hold her. And wherever we were, it usually felt as if Nelli was taking up most of the available space.
The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel Page 7