And he headed for the Cranston, a smiling man with a song in his heart, not the homicidal psychopath he was fifteen minutes previous. Love will do that to a man. And senile dementia. It has made Mr. Roast Beef a much nicer human being. It should happen to more people than it does.
TEN MINUTES LATER, MORE THUMPING on the door. It was Joey, all hot and bothered. “You sent me somewhere and I forgot where,” he said. “How about you write it down on a slip of paper.”
So his urge to canoodle with Lulu LaFollette was no longer strong enough to stick in his cerebellum. I said, “I was sending you home, Joey. Adele wants you to check on Pookie and Mr. Big Boy.”
“What’s wrong?” His eyes filled with tears. “Are they all right?”
Joey is quite devoted to his elderly Siamese. He called me once, devastated, when Pookie disappeared, and I joined him, walking up and down West 7th Street calling “Pookie Pookie Pookie.” A reputable PI and a 340-pound man in a black pinstriped suit walking to and fro and calling out “Pookie Pookie Pookie.” From such little deeds of kindness had I built the loyalty that made Joey hesitate to blow me a new buttonhole.
I told him the cats were fine. “They have a little fever, and Adele wants you to come home and slip a thermometer up their butts.”
He wrung his hands and whimpered something about not knowing what he would do if his babies got sick and died, and out the door he went. It was a whole other Joey from the guy aiming the pistol at my sternum. I made a mental note: Joey—vulnerable to extreme anxiety about cats. In case of emergency, ask him if Pookie is feeling better.
2
Naomi, O my Naomi
I STORED JOEY’S PISTOL IN the top drawer of my file cabinet, behind a bottle of booze and under a copy of Playboy (“Ten-page Pictorial: Women of the American Dairy Association”)—and I locked up the office and took the elevator down to the lobby. The organic fair-trade vegetarian restaurant Bright Morning Stars had a CLOSED sign in the window, having gone out of business two weeks before. Inside, the handcrafted chairs were stacked on the sustainable tables, the traditional quilts hanging on the walls were gone, ditto the sensitive waitstaff. St. Paul is a meatloaf-and-mashed-spuds kind of town, not big on lentils or groats and we prefer experienced olive oil. The Yarnery had closed, and the artisan sausage shop, The Wienery, replaced by Boyd’s Pet Rental (“Dogs, cats, birds, fish ---- low monthly rates—nice selection of colors”). I walked into the dim and cavernous Brew Ha Ha coffee shop just as Sharon the barista cranked up her espresso machine with a whisper of steam that sounded suggestive to me, like the sighs of a woman I knew long ago who liked me to rub palm oil on her back. I think her name was Patty. I leaned up against the counter and ordered an ordinary coffee. Small. Black.
“How about a pumpkin latte?” she says. “Live it up for once.”
“Why put pie in your coffee? You’re supposed to drink your coffee while eating your pie, not dump the pumpkin in it. Just give me a black coffee. No flavoring. Except coffee beans.”
“Not even nutmeg?”
I shook my head.
“You want sprinkles with that?”
“No, thanks. No whipped cream either. Coffee.”
“Okay, Pops.”
THE PLACE WAS CRAWLING WITH art students from St. Paul Art School, Market Street (SPASMS), also known as Simply Pray And Send Money Soon, housed in the old Great Northern warehouse on Market Street. All you need to know about SPASMS, you could see in the students’ work hanging on the Ha Ha walls, dark blotchy images of blighted buildings, junkyards, deserted highways, and drunks on buses, rich with teen angst, the revenge of the incompetent on the lighthearted. Twenty or thirty students sat typing at laptops, texting on cell phones, talking their odd jittery talk—So she was like, Huh? And he goes like, Whatever. And I’m like, No way. And she’s like, Way. Kids with baggy low-slung pants and backward baseball caps and active vocabularies of about five hundred words. A generation of the Ten-second Glance, the Snack, the Quick Read, the Sound Bite, the Tweet. Everything snappy and quippy. No tolerance for the ponderous and pretentious. I like that. Lots in code. OMG. LOL. LMAO. WTF. You’re either awesome or gross. Either cool or total loser. I don’t claim to be awesome, but for the right woman I would make an effort in that direction. Especially a girl who is laughing her ass off.
Like the Chicago girl I met ages ago in New York when I worked in Harry’s Shoes and I showed her some fancy knee-high leather boots. She couldn’t choose between two pairs and asked me if she should pick the sexy ones or the comfortable ones. I was twenty-one. I said, “You’re already sexy. Pick the ones that make you feel good.” Next thing I knew, we were in the changing room, and I was kissing her pale trembling thighs, and she burst out laughing. She had silky blond hair, and she sat, legs apart, shrieking and writhing, the erotic and the comic all one thing to her. My supervisor, Hugh, threw open the door and asked what was I doing ---- “Customer service,” I said, and the girl laughed harder. Ah, youth, heedless youth ---- no woman my age has time for an amorous shoe salesman anymore.
A YOUTH WITH A TINGE of beard walked by doing fist bumps (Hey, wassup?) and plopped down next to a girl who pointed at her computer screen and a video of a cat walking into a glass door, falling down, getting up, walking solemnly away, as if this were a yoga position. “Cool,” he said. They all had glittery metal hanging from their eyebrows, eyelids, lips, earrings all around their ears, metal plugs in their noses and tongues—it looked like they had fallen face-first into the tackle box. Taptaptaptaptap. The sheer volume of data transmission was staggering, Facebook updates, posting, texting, e-mailing, and there at the counter, waiting for his latte, a kid gabbing on the phone about his girlfriend, Terry, who’d dumped him at a party so he drank ten beers and a wallop of vodka and smoked two big fat reefers and came home and puked and now he was feeling better except for the headache, and then he said, “Gotta run, Mom. Later. Love you, too.” And didn’t run. He stood there and typed on his iPhone a Facebook update about how he was thinking about getting started on his screenplay about a small town invaded by pockmarked one-eyed zombie clones carrying a mutant virus that turns human flesh into toxic fungus.
Poor kids. They’d talked their parents into fronting the dough for art school so the kiddos could prolong adolescence a few more years. That’s what MFA means. My Fascinating Adolescence. It’s the Montessori generation, so everybody wins a blue ribbon, everyone’s ideas are valid, everyone is on a journey, we’re all talented, all roads lead to Art. The girls dress like streetwalkers and the boys like drug dealers, and they adopt the slang of the black underworld, which they have no firsthand knowledge of, and they’re okay with that. They’re okay with not knowing much of anything. I envy them that. They had Ritalin and Prozac to smooth out the rough spots, and now they sit drinking expensive warmed milk and building elaborate shrines to themselves on Facebook as they try to live creative lives and be free and do good in the world, which is why we need Mexicans to sneak across the border and mow our lawns and clean our toilets—so the kids can sit around looking in a mirror and feeling like artists, though none of them can so much as draw a pink petunia in a plaster pot. But so what? The world belongs to the young and the daring, the avid, the adventurous, and when I hear young women laugh, as I always do in the Ha Ha, I think of the Chicago girl and her pale ticklish thighs. I wonder where she is now. (In her mid-sixties, that’s where.)
“YOU’RE LOOKING GOOD THIS MORNING,” said Sharon. “Very dapper. I like those green socks.” I smiled and dropped two bucks into her tip jar.
“I’m from the era when people used to get dolled up, babes. Ever since Liberace died, dressing up has gone out of style.”
“Who was Liberace?” she asked.
“He was a pianist with big flashy teeth and diamond rings who came out on stage in a brown sealskin coat and a matching Rolls-Royce,” I said. “And then a white sealskin coat and a white Rolls-Ro
yce. And then black. He wasn’t afraid to be the show-off. He played piano with cascading arpeggios under a blazing candelabra and he grinned constantly, showing off his dental work—he was Mr. Showmanship and gay as the day he was born and nobody cared because behind that grin were even more grins. He was a nut and people loved him for it.”
“Before my time,” she said. “Oh, by the way, a fatso in a seersucker suit came in looking for you. He looked really steamed. I meant to call you, but then I got busy.”
“No problem. A little misunderstanding. Guy by the name of Joey. He’s gone.”
“He a friend of yours?”
“Not a friend as Webster’s would define friend, but you wouldn’t want him for an enemy.”
“I heard that he once tried to suffocate somebody with a plastic dry-cleaning bag.”
“True. I was there. I was the one who kept him from killing the guy. A real jackass by the name of Larry B. Larry. He got his start sucking dimes out of pay toilets ---- that’s how no good he was. A real sleazebag. He was no lawyer, but he had business cards printed up that looked lawyerly and said LARRY B. LARRY, COUNSELOR AT LAW & PERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE. Went around in a spiffy pinstriped suit and bowtie and two-tone shoes, and he had a voice like corn oil. His specialty was trolling for people who’d found flies in their ointment. Mr. Larry would contact the ointment company and threaten a lawsuit. He worked on commission, 50 percent. Once he found an old lady who’d swallowed a fly at a lutefisk dinner and thought she’d die, so he went to the offices of Amalgamated Lutefisk and told them the lady had suffered traumatic brain damage and was about to file suit for $350,000. Well, Amalgamated thought it over and decided that rather than going to trial in front of a jury that might include people who’d had bad lutefisk experiences and run the risk of a large judgment, why not negotiate with the guy, so they offered him $75,000, and he snapped it up like a fox grabs a chicken. He was a real stinker. On that particular occasion when he almost got plasticated, he was telling me a dirty joke about a Catholic priest and an altar boy, and Joey overheard it, a slur on his faith, and stuffed the plastic bag down Mr. Larry’s throat and wrapped a coat hanger around his neck and commenced to throttle him. His eyes were spinning, his lunch was coming out his nostrils. I pried Joey’s fingers from the jerk’s neck and extracted the bag from his gullet. I said, ‘Joey, why waste a homicide rap on a crum bum like Larry? Why spend your twilight years in a six-by-ten cell just for the pleasure of wiping this yo-yo from the earth?’ And Joey let him go. And he was grateful to me. ‘Yer right,’ he says. ‘Pookie and Big Boy would die without me.’ He did me a lot of favors after that. Joey knew all the cops. He passed on useful information to me for years, out of gratitude. One thing about hoodlums, they do remember who did them a good turn. Also who did them dirt. But now Joey’s eighty-two, and he’s down with a nasty case of dementia. It can hit a gangster just like it hits your mama, except she is not packing a pistol. So I had to take Joey’s gun off him upstairs, and now I got to figure out how to give it back.”
A terrific story, and when I finished, I looked around for Sharon, and she was fishing in a big glass jar for raspberry biscotti. This happens to me more and more these days. I’m telling a fascinating tale to an attractive young woman, and halfway through it I realize that she is checking her phone for text messages. Have I become a garrulous old fart who people think Oh no not him when they see me approach?
One of many questions on my mind that cold afternoon.
And also: How had Joey gotten wind of my secret?
Had I talked in my sleep?
Had I slept with the wrong person? Had someone spotted my vacation brochure with a circle around the August 24 “Northern Nirvana” voyage of the MS Bel Canto, from Oslo for fourteen fun-filled nights in the fjords north to Tromsø and back, and my heavy underlining of “the King Haakon Penthouse Suite with king-size bed and 800 sq. ft. balcony with hot tub”?
If an elderly halfwit like Joey had sniffed out my secret, then half of St. Paul might be onto me, too. Maybe Lieutenant McCafferty, who has often promised me a one-way ticket to Winnipeg, or Gene Williker of the Dispatch, who’s made a career out of smacking down the upwardly mobile. McCafferty was still sore that I tripped him up in the St. Olaf Choir case. They had sung in Acapulco for a convention of Lutheran stockbrokers, and he nabbed them at the airport with a suitcase stuffed with marijuana, street value of $1.2 million. I proved that the airline had delivered the wrong bag. Also that the marijuana was alfalfa. Street value: a buck seventy-five. And McCafferty’s boss reassigned him to traffic control for thirty days, and he stood there in his neon orange vest waving his arms in the middle of Sixth and St. Peter and cursing me with every gin-flavored breath. Likewise Gene Williker would be thrilled to blow me out of the water, having fallen for the choral bust (WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S CHOIR: OLAF KIDS CAUGHT WITH STASH OF HASH) and gotten a sixty-day demotion to the obit division. I could picture him and McCafferty sniffing down my trail and putting the thumbscrews to witnesses and writing the indictment and then the sixty-five-point headline in the Monday paper (NOIR NABBED IN DRUG SCAM, FORMER B-GIRL SINGS TO GRAND JURY). Here I was, after years of low cash flow, sitting on a beautiful secret with the potential to boost me out of the Ditch of Despond and set me up on Easy Street and buy me the luxury cruise, the Corvette, the cashmere coat, the condo in Cancún, the cosmetic surgery, that I had long coveted, and bring wholehearted love into my life instead of the grudging attention of lonely women with self-esteem issues. All thanks to Naomi Fallopian, my old pal from back when I was a part-time bouncer at the Kit Kat Klub.
Ah, Naomi. Woman of my dreams. Song of my heart. Light of my loins. My rescuer.
I took the elevator back up to twelve, half expecting to see Joey lurking by my door, his faculties regained, waiting to crush me. I tiptoed down the hall and slipped into the office and turned on the electric heater. Which I had bought for $45 off a goombah relocating to Florida so he could get involved in the lucrative transplant organ racket. A sheet of ice on the window made it look as if the Acme were underwater. I took a hair dryer out of the file cabinet and blasted the ice on the glass so as to let in more light, but it was no go. I hate dimness, especially in winter. It gives me a feeling of incarceration. I thought, Guy, you have got to get out of this town, and Naomi is your ride.
Naomi Fallopian hailed from Homer, Minnesota, the youngest of eleven children of a hog farmer and his wife, and came to St. Paul at age seventeen to attend Bible school. It was her daddy’s wish. He was a fervent Baptist who when he went to town liked to stand outside the tavern singing “The Ninety-and-Nine” and handing out gospel tracts entitled “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” and as a consequence his baby daughter grew up curious about the sins of the flesh. She learned to dance the jitterbug swing. She learned to smoke Luckies and drink sloe gin. She earned a reputation as a very good kisser. So he shipped her off to Summit Bible College, where she roomed with a professor of New Testament named Lyman Humble and his wife, Persis, who prayed morning and night and at every meal and every snack and every cup of coffee. They said grace if they took two aspirin and a sip of water. Naomi was restive at the Humbles. She went off to class in the morning (after Professor Humble had led the three of them in a long twisting labyrinth of prayer and a long march through the Book of Deuteronomy), wearing the requisite shapeless brown dress, and took a detour to a drugstore on Selby Avenue and bought a pack of smokes. She took off the brown dress, under which she wore a red dress with a swooping neckline, and she made the rounds of the gin mills along the avenue, Costello’s and Schmutterer’s and Nina’s and the Common Good Cocktail Lounge, and strolled through each one with a tin cup and sang “She Is More to Be Pitied Than Censured,” draping an arm around the drunks and letting them breathe on her, and earned enough money to buy herself breakfast and lunch and a couple of non-Christian novels. She liked to roost in a luncheonette at Grand and Lexington, sit in
a back booth and eat apple fritters, and pore over Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler and Anita Loos (“Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse”) and was spotted one day by a fellow student who ratted on her, and she was hauled off to Chapel, where the entire student body gathered to pray for her soul, after which she was asked to repent, which she declined to do.
“You preach about love, but none of you has enough warmth in you to melt snow,” she cried. “I don’t know how much of the Bible is true and how much is just a bad dream, but I do believe that if Jesus lived in St. Paul, he wouldn’t be sitting around in this school of sanctimony congratulating himself on what a nice person he is. He’d be walking up and down Selby Avenue just like I do.”
And she marched out of Chapel and never returned, and when I met her three years later, she was dancing seven nights a week at the Kit Kat Klub near the Union Depot, a murky after-hours joint that catered to barge hands and railroad men who needed to get hammered and look at bare skin and shove dollar bills in the dancers’ underwear. The Folies Bergère it was not. Most of the dancers were long past prime and starting to sag, and Naomi was fresh-faced and perky and bouncy and she reminded those old galoots of girls they wished they had dated in high school and there she was doing the Hitchhiker in a sequinny G-string with smiley-face stickers on her nipples that she peeled off, and concluded her performance by tossing the G-string into the crowd. I took a fatherly interest in her and protected her from Dave the comedian (“Hey, who wants to see my tits????”) and Jervis the manager, who liked to stroll into the dressing room without knocking, and the mouth breathers who hunkered up close to the footlights, gaping at her, stuffing ten-dollar bills into her butt crack. The crisp new bills scratched her there, and she sometimes asked me to apply Vaseline to the affected area, which I did, respectfully, in a brisk businesslike manner, taking no liberties. I always bought her a beer after her shift and advised her on career matters—she wanted to become an actress and get into the movies—and I persuaded her to enroll at the University of Minnesota, and helped with her tuition, and I fended off her ex-boyfriends who hung around in the alley, pining. I told them, “She’s moving on, fellows, so wish her well and count yourselves lucky to have known her and now get the hell out of here.” She graduated from the U magna non troppo and I attended the ceremony and took her to dinner at Vescio’s and urged her to apply for the Mary Magdalene fellowship at St. Kate’s, and she did, and eventually she sort of drifted away, as so many do when they get a Ph.D.
Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Page 2