Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  I didn’t make it to the bedroom. I face-planted on the couch and didn’t wake up until late in the afternoon, when I felt a little over a hundred pounds on my back. It was Renée, amusing herself by sitting on me Indian-style, reading Us Weekly, until I stirred. I opened one eye. Barely pried the other, black one open. It took a while for me to focus, but I could make out my own image on the flat-screen in the room. CNN was covering my fugitive story. I looked around for a remote before Renée turned around and found out the truth about Raoul McFarland. Fortunately for me, she was fixated on my busted-up face.

  “Holy moly! Like, what happened to you?”

  “What do you mean? How was bingo?”

  “What do I mean? Look at your face!”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Cheese and rice, Raoul. What the heck happened?”

  “I ran into an old friend. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing shmuthing. I gotta get you some ice with the quickness.”

  She ran to the bar, which gave me the opportunity to find the remote, shut off the TV, and remove the batteries in the event that she got any ideas about turning the sucker back on. CNN was basically proof positive that the story not only had legs but was running around media outlets that had no sports component whatsoever. I knew from Maurice’s texts that the story had swept across social media faster than anything since that teenage girl took a selfie at Auschwitz, but I didn’t give a shit about that, either. I probably had less than twenty-four hours left at this point, and if I was kicking myself for anything, it was falling asleep and burning nearly a dozen hours I couldn’t afford to waste.

  “Here. Put this on your handsome face,” Renée said, coming at me with an ice-filled towel. “Are you, like, gonna tell me what happened or not?”

  “I was out in front of O’Sheas,” I said. “This old woman was, you know, getting hassled by some drunks, and it escalated. I had to get involved. It was the right thing to do.”

  “Holy moly. The craziest stuff happens to you! You’re amazing,” she said, kissing my tender cheek. “You’re like the coolest thing ever. Black eyes are crazy sexy, FYI. Any girl will tell you that.”

  “Hey, remember when you said you could find just about anybody on social media? Whether they’re on it or not?”

  “Yepper.”

  “I might need some help.”

  “Who you looking for?”

  “Who’m I looking for?” I said, searching for a lie, which was never far away. “I’m looking for my sister. She’s about to get hitched to a very bad guy, and the whole family is worried sick. No one knows where she is, and word is she’s getting married tomorrow.”

  “The wrong guy can ruin your life big-time.”

  “Right? That’s why I need your help.”

  “You’re such a good brother,” she said, hopping off the couch and starting to do lunges across the room. “Does she have a Spanishy-sounding name like you?”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re super-white-looking, and your name is Raoul . . .”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah. Her name is Margarita.”

  “That’s badass! I wish my name was Margarita. Renée is such a meh name. That’s why I added the accent. To make it less meh. And also ’cause Renée Zellweger does that, and I liked that Bridget Jones movie. Did you know she was American? How crazy is that?”

  “How can we find her?”

  “Renée Zellweger? I don’t know. She probably lives in Malibu or someplace fancy like that.”

  “Not Renée Zellweger. My sister.”

  “Ohhh. Margarita. Yeah. Right. Obviously. Blonde moment. If you give me a list of your sister’s friends, I’ll track her down, no sweat.”

  I choked down a couple of painkillers, poured a vodka pineapple, and started writing names on an MGM notepad as she finished up her impromptu workout. People we knew from Atlanta. From the firm. From Myrtle Beach. Man—what a list of traitors. They had abandoned me one and all.

  “Is this enough?”

  “Totally.”

  She whipped out her phone and iPad and went to work with the care of a DNA specialist. She also took her shirt off. I have no idea why.

  “Do you—”

  “Silencio,” she said, holding up a hand. “I’m Sherlock Holmesing the fuck outta this situation.”

  “OK. Gotcha. I’m gonna run downstairs and talk to Bob Mota right quick. If we find Margarita, I may need to take their private jet. Time’s of the essence.”

  “You’re Joe VIP. They’ll give you whatever you want,” she said, not looking up.

  I grabbed the bag of cash and headed toward the door.

  “Raoul?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d hump a stranger for a Mocha Frappuccino right now.”

  “That’s—”

  “Kidding. That’s gross. But maybe you can bring me one?”

  “One Mocha Frappuccino, coming up,” I said, heading for the door.

  “You’re a massive babe,” she said.

  Downstairs, Bob Mota looked up from his desk and shook his head when he saw me walk in, bag in hand. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Remember me?”

  “Yeah. You look like the asshole who was here before, only worse. You’re one of those cuckoo birds, aren’t you, Parisi? Guy with a death wish or something like that. You look like you jumped in front of a car.”

  I tossed the bag on his desk. “My name’s Raoul,” I said. “Guess what this is?”

  “It’s too small to be a body.”

  I opened it and showed him the cash. “Six hundred twelve thousand, five hundred. On the nose. Sound familiar?”

  “I’d ask what the fuck’s going on if I gave enough of a shit,” he said.

  “Oh. If you don’t give a shit, then I’ll just go play it somewhere else. I’m putting it all on one hand. Then, after I win, I’m putting all of it on another hand. And then I’d like to borrow the private jet.”

  He and Lou Gehrig both looked at me. Mota smirked. Gehrig didn’t.

  “You mind if I ask you a question, whatever you’re calling yourself?”

  “Shoot.”

  “The fuck is happening here? Honestly.”

  “I can’t tell you, Bob. All I can say is that you think there’s one story going on, but in reality there’s another, bigger story you know nothing about. I don’t have time to explain it to you. You want my play or not?”

  “Oh, I’ll take your play.”

  “Let’s go, then. Time is not on my side.”

  “That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense at all.”

  I told him I wanted privacy. And I didn’t care who the dealer was. In my mind, it wasn’t going to make a difference. Hell, they could have brought the Old Rooster Bollinger in to deal, and I still wouldn’t have worried. I had this. I knew I had this. I have no idea why I’d gone so dark after talking to L. I have no idea why I’d taken that conversation as the nail in my coffin when it clearly wasn’t. But maybe that was how it was supposed to play out. The roulette scenario certainly had brought the tale to another level and would make for great dinner conversation in Athens for sure.

  Mota brought me to a small VIP salon. Two racks of chips were waiting, along with a dealer named Damon, a quiet Aussie with ADELAIDE on his name tag. Where had I heard Adelaide before? Had I read it somewhere?

  “Raoul’s going to play it all,” Mota said to a couple of severe-looking men in suits who had followed us and were lurking like crows on a wire. Some kind of casino execs. Fuck them. They could watch all they wanted.

  “Where’s Manny?” I asked. “He should see this.”

  “Manny’s at the lake with his wife,” Mota said.

  Jesus. Manny C. was married, and I was scrambling to save myself? How was that fair?

  “That’s too bad. He’s going to miss the fun. And Bob, so you know, don’t get any ideas about dropping a dime on me after I beat you out of this money. They’ll take it when they take me, and you’ll never se
e it again.”

  “Play the fucking game already, will you, Ray? You were on my last nerve two days ago.”

  I looked at the dealer. Rapped my hand on the table. “Gimme my twenty, Damon,” I said. “That’ll be enough.”

  I felt no fear. In fact, it was the calmest I’d felt since I had lost L to weakness and circumstance. As Damon moved to deal, I smiled. Was there any doubt that I had a couple of face cards coming? He snapped the first card in front of me. A 6. Wait, a what? OK. OK. No worries. No worries at all. A 5 would be next for 11. Then a face for 21. We’d do it that way. Take a little walk around the old block. Juice things up a little. Why not?

  Damon put his hole card down, then snapped an 8 in front of me for 14. He turned an ace for himself. Oh no. No. A 14 on an ace? I couldn’t believe my eyes. How was this happening? That was my ace in front of him. This was his 14.

  “Jesus, Damon.”

  “Sorry, mate.”

  Mota stood to the side of the table and smirked at the suits. These motherfuckers, I thought. What kind of men conspired and rooted against love? The Aussie slid his hole card in front of the tiny plastic square that would tell him whether it was a natural blackjack or not. If he had a 10 or a face down, I was done for. The Hard Rock would have been nothing but a cosmic joke. The last laugh on old Ray Parisi. Damon looked down. Didn’t move. Looked up. No blackjack. The suits frowned. They wanted the natural so they could show me the door for good. But they weren’t worried. They knew I had no choice but to hit, and anything over a 7 would be el busto for Raoul. I closed my eyes. That lack of nervousness I had seconds earlier? Gone, baby, gone.

  “All right. Gimme the seven, Damon. One time.”

  He looked at me. I’d like to think he was rooting for that 7. Aussies are generally solid people, and I felt like he was a good fellow. He was certainly no Ho. Damon snapped down what may have been the last card I’d ever see. A 3. I was stuck in no-man’s-land. A 17 against an ace. There are a million ways to lose to an ace. It can be a 1 or an 11. The odds were bleak. In the movies, the player would do something outlandish here. He’d know that he was going to lose to that ace, and he’d do the unthinkable. Break every rule of basic strategy and hit the 17, though that’s something only a severely handicapped person (or a booze- and drug-addled jackass who thought he’d lost his wife forever) would do. But there’s no question the movie guy hits that 17, draws a 4, and inspires the suits to look at each other in utter shock and dismay. But this was no movie. This was my life. And I waved my hand over my cards like I was supposed to. I was finally learning.

  Damon turned his hole card. There could be no face there, but a 7, 8, or 9, and I was done. He rolled it. It was another ace.

  “Two or twelve,” he said.

  I ran numbers in my head. I had avoided a catastrophe and was left facing a disaster. There were still a million ways to lose. I started to wish I had just busted and gotten it over with. Where I once thought I may have been the recipient of some kind of divine intervention, it occurred to me that being saved and being killed slowly are not the same thing.

  Damon snapped down the next card. A 4. “Six or sixteen.”

  Everyone stared at the table. Anything small and it was over. He turned over another 6. I thought for a moment it was 21. I think one of the suits did, too. But the math said otherwise.

  “Twelve.”

  “Goddammit, give me that face,” I said. “Please gimme the face.”

  The dealer took a deep breath. Turned a king. I slapped my good hand on the table: 22.

  “Player wins.”

  Mota was emotionless. The suits were edgy. They had just seen a sure thing slip away: $1.2 million was put in front of me.

  “One more time,” I said. “Just one more. C’mon, Damon. I deserve this.”

  If it was tense before, now it was almost unbearable. Everyone knew I was playing only two hands. This was it. This was the end of my gambling life, one way or the other. I’d soon be just another cautionary tale, or a legend alongside Johnny Chan and the others.

  “Paint me up.”

  Damon looked at the suits, then snapped down a queen.

  “There you go,” I said. “There’s the paint.”

  He dealt his hole card and then gave me another queen. A beautiful pair of ladies. I stared at them for a moment as he dealt himself a 10, then turned his hole card. An ace and I was done. But it wasn’t an ace. It was a 9. I jumped out of my seat and started running around like a mad dog. I circled the table no fewer than five times, extending both middle fingers and screaming, “Fuck you! Fuck you, motherfuckers! Fuck you!” over and over, until the suits walked away and Bob Mota sat down in a chair, a look on his face that someone might have mistaken for a smile.

  When I walked into the suite, Renée was still shirtless and lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, with dozens of scraps of paper around her. She looked like a stripper pulling an all-nighter before finals. She looked up at me. “Memphis.”

  “What?”

  “Something’s up in Memphis.”

  Memphis. Of course. The son of a bitch was from Memphis. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  “The son of a bitch is from Memphis.”

  “Well, that’s where— Hey, where’s my Frap?”

  “Shit. I got sidetracked.”

  “Augh. You’re worse than Leslie,” she said, then froze and looked at me with dead seriousness. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry I said that. It’s so not true.”

  “It’s OK. You want me to go back down?”

  “It’s cool. Just check this out.” She started grabbing scraps of paper. “Look. Here’s Kelly Hogan and her gross husband eating barbecue at a place called Pork with an Attitude. I think. That’s in Memphis. And here’s Pete and Elyssa Gaffney on Beale Street. Also in Memphis. What else? Here’s Hope For-te-something—”

  “Hope Fortescu. Jesus.”

  “—at the place the ‘I have a dream’ dude died. That’s—”

  “In Memphis.”

  “Right. And both the Hamiltons—they’re so tacky—and Jordy Fowler posted pics from Graceland, where what’s-his-face used to live before he got shot.”

  “Elvis? I don’t think he got shot.”

  “Yeah, he did. In New York.”

  “OK.”

  “Of the twenty names you gave me, twelve have posted pics from Memphis, and everyone else has said something about going to Memphis for the holiday weekend. Every last one of them. But no one says anything about your sister’s wedding. Which is pretty weird.”

  “That’s because they don’t want me to find out. I’m the only one who knows how bad this guy is.”

  “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

  “More than you know,” I said soberly.

  “Do you want me to come with you for backup?”

  I thought about it for half a second. Showing up with Renée would be nothing short of a disaster.

  “No, sweetheart. Things could get hairy. I need you to stay here. Keep your phone and your computer on you. I may need you to look up some things for me.”

  Her face fell. This was the second time I was leaving with no intention of coming back.

  “If everything goes OK, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “In time for the fireworks, you think?”

  “Hopefully. Yeah.”

  “Your sister’s really lucky, you know. And not just ’cause she has an ass-kicking name like Margarita. I wish I had a big brother like you. Or maybe one that wasn’t so good-looking. It’d be weird to have a brother who was hot.”

  I gave her a hug and a kiss. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to miss her a little.

  “Can I tell you something?” I said.

  “Is it a good thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure! Tell me!”

  “You did a hell of a job, Renée. Hell of a job. You might have changed some lives here. I can’t thank you enough.”

  I looked at her. Out of no
where, tears were pouring down her face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She buried her head in my chest. She must know, I thought. She must sense the kind of person I am and that I’m not coming back.

  “Hey,” I said. “Renée. What’s the matter?”

  She wiped her face on my shirt. Looked up at me with big, moist eyes. She really was only a kid.

  “Nothing. It’s just that’s probably the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me. Heck, nobody’s ever been this nice to me before in my whole life. That shopping trip? I’m never going to forget it as long as I live. I used to think that I’d like to be a millionaire someday so I could go all the places I wanna go, but if all I ever have is that shopping trip, I think maybe that’d be OK. I mean, maybe I won’t be a millionaire, and maybe I won’t see everything there is to see, but after this week I’ll still think I did pretty good and maybe better than some other people. At least I got out of Blowhio and did something different. And I met you. That’s good, right?”

  I held her tight. Whispered in her ear. “It’s good,” I said. “You did really good.”

  SWIMMING WITH BRIDGEPORT GIRLS

  August 8

  . . . I told her about the last trip R and I took, when we met Jordy and Benny up at the Vineyard (Benny turned out to be another Great American Boy-Man, didn’t he?). Our house was at the crest of a hill, and I watched R speed down on a beach cruiser one morning. He looked so unencumbered. So free. Golden hair wild in the wind. Sun on his face. Big smile. The next day I pulled a Schwinn out of the garage and walked it to the top of the hill. I looked down and started to go, my hand resting on the brake. My eyes immediately searching for potential trouble. My hand never left the brake. I couldn’t remove it even if I wanted to. If there’s any magic to youth, it’s in not knowing all the things that can happen in life. That will happen in life. The bikes sit in a garage all year, rusting away, uncared for, and then they’re yanked out in the summer and expected to perform. Tires can pop. Chains can seize. There are unseen stones in the road, and people parking, carelessly opening doors without looking. I remembered the Japanese girl struck by the cab door in Tribeca. Jennifer and Rodrigo’s son going over the handlebars near the golf course. Those long nights in the ICU. The dim expression that settled on his face forever after. R blazed down that hill in thirty seconds. I tapped the brake and eased down in ninety. Maybe it’s a small thing, but this is who we are now.