Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  As we rolled toward DC in the darkness, L put on Springsteen’s Live 1975–85, and this is the moment when things could have been different. This is the time I might have liberated myself from a prison I wasn’t even aware I was building. Before “The River,” Bruce tells a story about his father. With just a melancholy acoustic guitar and a ghostly organ behind him, he speaks in a manner so earnest, so confidential, that it feels like he’s talking directly to you, and not to what was probably close to a hundred thousand people at the LA Coliseum that night in 1985. I defy any living person to listen to the story and remain unmoved, and anyone with any father issues will be hard-pressed to keep from falling apart entirely. L and I held hands as he said this:

  How you doing out there tonight? That’s good. That’s good. When I was growing up, me and my dad used to go at it all the time, over almost anything. I used to have really long hair, way down past my shoulders. When I was seventeen or eighteen, oh, man, he used to hate it. And we got to where we’d fight so much that I’d spend a lot of time out of the house. In the summertime it wasn’t so bad, ’cause it was warm, and your friends were out, but in the winter, I remember standing downtown, it would get so cold, and when the wind would blow, I had this phone booth that I used to stand in, and I used to call my girl, like, for hours at a time, just talking to her all night long. And finally I’d get my nerve up to go home, and I’d stand there in the driveway, and he’d be waiting for me in the kitchen, and I’d tuck my hair down in my collar, and I’d walk in, and he’d call me back to sit down with him, and the first thing he’d always ask me was what did I think I was doing with myself? And the worst part about it was I could never explain it to him. I remember I got in a motorcycle accident once, and I was laid up in bed, and he had a barber come in and cut my hair. And man, I could remember telling him that I hated him, and that I would never, ever forget. And he used to tell me, “I can’t wait until the army gets you. When the army gets you, they’re gonna make a man out of you. They’re gonna cut all that hair off, and they’ll make a man out of you.” And this was in, I guess, ’68, when there was a lot of guys from the neighborhood going to Vietnam. I remember the drummer in my first band coming over my house with his marine uniform on, saying that he was going and that he didn’t know where it was. And a lot of guys went, and a lot of guys didn’t come back. And a lot that came back weren’t the same anymore. I remember the day I got my draft notice, I hid it from my folks, and three days before my physical, me and my friends went out and we stayed up all night. When we got on the bus to go that morning, man, we were all so scared. And I went, and I failed. It’s nothing to applaud about. And I remember coming home after being gone for three days and walking in the kitchen, and my mother and father were sitting there, and my dad said, “Where you been?” I said, “I went to take my physical.” He said, “What happened?” I said, “They didn’t take me.” And he said, “That’s good.”

  I tried to mask the tears in my eyes, but when I looked over to L, I could see she was crying, too. I could have told her everything right then and there. I think she would have understood. Certainly she would have. There was no depth to the lie then. Time and repetition are what make people feel betrayed, and we had neither of those things behind us yet. I could have told her, Look, what you heard about my parents isn’t true. I don’t know why I said that, but it’s not true. What’s true is something else. What’s true is that when I was thirteen years old, my mother filled the pockets of a fur coat with my father’s rare coin collection and walked off into the lake behind our house. I was at my friend Ben Langraf’s house when my father showed up at the door. It was startling. I didn’t think he knew who my friends were, much less where they lived.

  I could have shared with L that my father told me what happened on the drive home, and how frogmen were in the lake when we got back to the house, and how otherworldly their searchlights looked beneath the dark water, and how I never forgot the image of a frogman who came out of the lake, put his slick hand on my shoulder, and walked off into the night. I didn’t tell her that my father and I never spoke, and that the old man spent all of his time at his restaurant while I spent mine out of the house, just like Bruce, hanging out with friends until their curfews kicked in, and then talking on pay phones to girls late into the night. When I’d come home, he’d often be sitting at the kitchen table, just like Springsteen’s dad, the glow of his cigarette the only thing visible in the darkness. He, too, would ask me what I thought I was doing with myself. He hated me, it seemed, and I hated him right back. Hated the way he played the patriarch with his staff. Hated his phony spiel with his regular customers. Hated the way he absorbed the attention and pity at my mother’s funeral. Hated that he referred to what happened as “the accident.”

  I blamed him for what happened to my mother. For much of my childhood, she was gone on “research trips,” and I assumed her absence was due to the fact that he was a philanderer, and she’d rather be abs-orbed in nature than bear witness to his crushing infidelities, even if it meant leaving your son behind. I had no proof, of course, but I felt like my suspicions were confirmed after I finally graduated and he told me that he’d fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old hostess and was selling the restaurant and moving to Michigan.

  Again, I told L none of this that night. I didn’t tell her that I accused my father of all manner of horrid conduct, and laid the blame for my mother’s long absences and subsequent death directly at his feet. And I didn’t tell her how he exploded, telling me that my mother’s research trips weren’t that at all, but rather stint after stint in the psych ward. She had struggled with schizophrenia since I was a boy, and they chose not to tell me, inventing tales of ecological adventures instead. I suppose this would have been the perfect opportunity to point out that I had been raised in the world of the big lie, and how that must have informed my own choice to make up the grandparents story, and that I was born anew, meeting L, and wanted to live with her forever in the clean light of truth. That connection was available to me, I see, but those words never came close to leaving my mouth. My desire was to live in a new place with L and never look back. Wasn’t that a logical impulse? Wasn’t reinventing yourself what being an American was all about? If Norma Jeane could become Marilyn and Zimmerman could become Dylan and Gatz could become Gatsby, then why couldn’t Ray Parisi leave his own trash at the curb and roll right away? My love for L was the truest thing in my life. It never wavered. Shouldn’t that have been all that mattered?

  When we got down to Washington, it was drizzling, and there were no cherry blossoms to be found. I hadn’t realized they were exclusive to the springtime, but L didn’t care. As a dim light broke, we held hands and walked around in the quiet of morning. We climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and shimmied up onto Abe’s lap. Gave mock speeches on the great Mall. At one point, we made our way to the Vietnam Memorial. An uncle she never met, Lucille’s older brother, had been killed over there, and L wanted to find him. The Springsteen story in the car had sparked her. I remember they had these books on brass stands so you could look up a name and know what panel of the wall to find it on. But L wasn’t interested in that. She didn’t want to look at the books. She had a reverence for things and was not a person who believed in shortcuts of any kind. Instead, she started at the very beginning and went name by name, running her finger down the slick black granite, taking in each stranger. Absorbing each person’s memory somehow. Bearing witness. I was a shortcut person, of course, and immediately looked up her uncle’s name in the book. I knew it would be hours before she came to it, but that didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I don’t ever recall being more at peace than I was at that moment. I sat on a stone bench and watched her with a look of wonder. As rain tumbled over the capital, I gazed at that perfect, luminous face reflecting off the black granite, and thought of the new, better half of the world that had just been cracked open for me. I sat alone, hatless and content, as my girl inched along the great wall, slowly tra
cing her index finger over the engraved names of the dead.

  BEHOLD, HERE COMETH THE DREAMER

  September 15

  When I mentioned going up to Newtown to help in some way, R blanched. He can’t handle grief. He wouldn’t even watch Sandy Hook coverage on the news, and whenever I got back, he’d act like I had been to the movies or something meaningless. He never wanted to talk about it. He wouldn’t even take a stance on something as obvious as gun control. He couldn’t understand how any of it had anything to do with him or me. R was truly mystified by how much it moved me. Why it mattered. He has no idea that it’s all that matters. That it’s all connected. Then again, this is a person who remembers 9/11 as an event that ruined his basketball league. Meanwhile, Boyd came up from Tennessee and set up a relief center for rescue workers with his own money. Made grilled-cheese sandwiches all night for weeks . . .

  MGM’S PRIVATE PLANE WAS PILOTED by a guy who never told me his name and spoke precisely one sentence to me. Granted, I was passed out for the entire flight, but he did not greet me as a VIP or anything resembling a VIP (if anything, he looked at me like I was a potential hijacker). The only interaction we had was when he woke me up at the private airfield in Memphis, reminding me I had twenty-four hours before the jet would return to Vegas. It wasn’t easy to get the plane in the first place. After shaking off what must have been an overwhelming urge to kill himself (or at least call the cops), Bob Mota had refused to let me leave town with the plane and the money. I could have one or the other, he said, but letting me out of his sight with the MGM jet and the money was out of the question. He reminded me that: 1) I’d have a lot of explaining to do if I tried to take the money on a commercial flight; and 2) the airport was probably not the optimal place for a fugitive to be showing his face, pocketful of Raoul McFarland identification or not. He was right, of course, and in the end we settled things the Vegas way: I paid him $75,000 in cash. In exchange, I got to take the duffel bag of money with me and had use of the plane for twenty-four hours.

  I paid off Mota, then asked for a box and a FedEx label from his assistant. I put $325,000 in the box with a note written on Grand stationery that read “Penelope Dondero College Fund” and shipped it to Dawn’s apartment, which left me with exactly $2 million in the bag, $10,000 in my pocket, and something resembling a clear conscience. It was as if losing everything and staring into the futureless pit of despair had loosed something in me. Suddenly I was able to instinctively know what the right thing to do was after a seemingly endless run of doing nothing but the wrong thing.

  We landed in Memphis just before midnight on Friday, the third of July. The pilot gave me his cell number to contact him when I was ready to go back (that was never happening—I’d just give him a stack of cash and have him take us to Georgia once it was all said and done). I shook off the delirium of sleep, stashed the bag with the $2 million on the plane, choked down a couple of painkillers, and then whipped out my phone and started poring through a slew of messages from Detective Renée (I ignored all the other ones, which were the usual shitshow of threats and incredulity). She had been hard at work, updating me on the whereabouts of L’s friends on the list I had given her and sending screen grabs and photos as well. You could tell she was enjoying the assignment.

  “@hopefortescu is at cafe ole wt @clairehamilton, @bethmccarthy1, @fionasweeney.”

  “u land yt?”

  “@philober sez gus chicken is da bomb. ew.”

  “manny c is a creeeeeeeep.”

  “cafe ole peeps goin 2 beale st.”

  “ur sisters friends suk.”

  “does margarita drink margaritas?”

  “chk out ths cute hotel ducks!”

  “miss u alredy!”

  “u land yt?”

  “raoooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!”

  I looked at a picture of five ducks marching down a red carpet in an ornate hotel lobby (what the hell?) and kept scrolling through. There were multiple pics of Renée lounging around the hotel in her robe (and possibly a little less in one of them) and more updates on where people were eating dinner, but it was past midnight on the East Coast, a little after one in the morning, and information about where people were having dinner wouldn’t help me. The pilot called me a cab, and while I was waiting, I kept sifting through Renée’s texts and finally hit the jackpot.

  “raoool! big crwd @wetwillies. 983 beale st”

  “this is frm @hopefortescu . . . old skool party time @wetwillies w/ @p_gaffney, @suzannedeak, @bethmccarthy1, @clairehamilton, and benny fowler. benny’s 2 cool 4 social mdia!”

  I assessed some of the names and put them into two categories in my mind: Enemy and Ally. This was important, because I couldn’t just roll into a bar and start asking questions. Some of them would call the cops, particularly the women, who considered me Public Enemy #1 and spread all kinds of bullshit rumors about Dawn Dondero and me over the past year. Hope Fortescu, for example, had ripped me so mercilessly that I have no idea how she found time to do anything else. She even sent out a Facebook picture that Dawn posted after graduating from hairdressing school, which I thought was a cheap shot. She was just the worst of the worst, Hope, and topped the Enemy list. Based on who seemed to be hanging out on Beale Street at the moment, things looked like this:

  ENEMY: Hope Fortescu, Suzanne Deak, Beth McCarthy, Claire Hamilton, Fiona Sweeney.

  These ladies were a five-headed beast of rumormongering and moral intractability.

  ALLY: Benny Fowler. Pete Gaffney?

  Benny was the last one who jumped ship on me, but only because his wife forced him to cut me loose. Gaffney I wasn’t sure about. He was mildly trustworthy, but a self-preservationist at heart, and married to Elyssa, who hated me beyond reason.

  I walked the tarmac out to a service road to await the taxi. Vegas was hotter, sure, but Memphis had a sticky factor that lent some credence to the whole “dry heat” thing that people who live in the desert try to pitch as justification for settling down in a place where triple-digit temps are the norm and any room without central air feels like a Cambodian prison cell. I must say that I enjoyed the humidity and felt instantly at home again in the South, where L and I had spent our first four years together and had some of the best times of our lives.

  I figured my best play was to go to Wet Willie’s, stay as incognito as possible, and try to avoid the women. If I could isolate Pete Gaffney, or better yet, get Benny Fowler alone, then I’d very likely get to the bottom of where this charade of a wedding was being held, and also where I could find L before she made the biggest mistake of her life. Gaffney was something of a wild card, like I said, but I knew Benny was unlikely to rat me out because: 1) though he went to Yale at the same time L did, I met him first; 2) Benny had gotten himself into a dicey situation not all that dissimilar to the Dawn misunderstanding and was simpatico on some level (his transgression was actually way worse, since he was guilty); and 3) I played in a basketball league with his brother, Jack, before he was killed in the Towers, and that fact deeply bonded us in his mind.

  My cab arrived and we rolled toward Beale Street in the muggy Memphis night. It was a town I’d never been to, but I liked it immediately. It seemed to have a retro feel, an early-seventies vibe. A little down at the heels. I looked at the timeworn buildings and watched random fireworks popping in the distance as we drove into town, then got out on Beale, which reminded me a lot of Bourbon Street (save for the ubiquitous sound of blues instead of jazz). Throngs of people getting an early start on the holiday weekend jammed the streets, most of them either tourists or college kids, and all of them wasted. They were hanging off balconies, weaving en masse down Beale, swilling out of go cups, and basically howling at the moon from every possible direction, most of the guys in the standard frat-boy uniform of khaki shorts, oxfords, Top-Siders, and soiled baseball caps with exaggerated curved brims, and the girls just spilling out of clothes they all seemed to have rooked from a far younger sister’s closet. Everyone was soaked in sweat
and had cut loose any inhibitions they might have clung to a few hours earlier. Sloppy didn’t begin to describe the scene.

  I jostled my way down Beale, looking for Wet Willie’s. Some yo-yo sporting a torn Grizzlies jersey decided that it might be hilarious to drop his pants, bend over, stick bottle rockets up his ass, and send them whistling into the crowd. It reminded me of the afternoon all of this started, with Bruce going wild and blowing my cover with L. I hadn’t thought much about Connecticut since I’d left on my quest, and now that I had $2 million and was close to getting L back, I could barely remember having lived at the motel in the first place. It seemed to belong not only to another lifetime but to another person in that other lifetime, and that individual was definitely not me. I was a man with a plan. A guy on a roll. A legend on the floor of high-end casinos who stayed in swank suites and did his traveling on private jets. Why would I ever have lived at a fucking motel?

  It took Johnny Ass Rocket about thirty seconds to wind up in handcuffs, and I lowered my head as I passed the cops, adjusting my shades as I went. I was safe amid the chaos, but I knew that I needed to be careful and was entering a delicate situation. I needed to avoid anyone on the Enemy list, somehow find L, tell her what I was doing as far as the Kinder house was concerned, and get her to come home with me before she made the blunder of the century and married a human pair of khakis. I couldn’t afford any mishaps or get sidetracked in any way. I had seen enough war movies to know what could happen if you slipped up behind enemy lines.

  The pills started kicking in hard just as I found Wet Willie’s. The doors were open, and it was a free-for-all inside. It was sad to think that this was all human evolution had come to. I approached the bouncer, who put up a thick paw.

  “Move along, tough guy. We’re all done.”