COLD PLATE SPECIAL
by Rob Widdicombe
Published by Saltimbanque Books
New York
COLD PLATE SPECIAL
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also From Saltimbanque Books
COLD PLATE SPECIAL
Copyright © 2017 by Rob Widdicombe
Cover photo by Edward Pond / Masterfile
Cover designed by Rob Widdicombe
and Mary Kathryn Willkens
Interior designed by Christopher Boynton
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
ISBN: 978-1-941914-08-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.
Dedicated to the memory of
Mike “Cinderblock” Holtzman
PART 1
1
KILLING MOTORCAR WAS something I had not thought about in a long time. A good long time. Maybe a year. Ten solid months at least. I was done with all that. Completely done. Sure, he would still cross my mind every now and then in a fleeting way, like anyone from your past will pop into your head for no special reason—a teacher or a neighbor or a distant uncle. But it had been a while since I last fantasized about putting Motorcar’s lights out, an act I used to visualize constantly and in glorious variety and detail. When things started getting better, the fantasies stopped. I thought I was cured.
I thought it was over.
The cheap walls of my cubicle were covered with a pale charcoal blue fabric. A kind of glorified burlap. Lately I had been spending a lot of time staring into their blue charcoal depths. I drew a weird comfort from losing myself in the cool span of blue-gray fibers, the rough and fuzzy texture. My eyes zoomed out, zoomed in. Lately the boredom had been gripping me by the back of the neck. The documents, the e-mails, the computer screen, the technical difference between paper clips and binder clips. The minutiae of every blah detail. The nervous buzzing from the overhead fluorescent lights. How the broken copier vibrated and knocked like a washing machine with a lopsided load. The sick waves of fake butter smell from Renada’s microwave popcorn that roamed the cubicle paths like a toxic industrial gas. And there was Jeff Teeler down in Trusts & Estates with his air whistling. He knew that full-on whistling was unacceptable in a professional law office, so he whistled silently. Teeler’s peppy birdsong was so muted that all you could hear was the air blowing through his lips. Whatever the tune was, only he knew. I kept meaning to call him out on it, but I could never find the right words. Something like: What’s that hit song you’re not whistling there, eh Teeler? But by the time I had thought of something good to zing him with, he had already blown on by.
The office walls and carpet were beige like a flooding river of bad milk, swallowing everything. The bathroom was beige. The filing cabinets were beige. The people I worked with, beige. My enthusiasm for the job, even beiger. At home in my tiny suburban Maryland cookie-cutter apartment, the tan carpet and the eggshell white walls joined forces to create an overall theme of quietly muted beige. And according to my lease, I wasn’t allowed to paint. I couldn’t get away from it—the safest, least offensive, most neutrally dull color ever invented.
But beige did seem to perfectly match my milquetoast existence at Reinhaus, Thompkins & Watts LLP. The job was cheese-grater-to-the-brain times a million. At my interview, they made the whole paralegal thing sound like I’d be privy to all these hot cases. A “key team player,” they said. Somewhere along the way they forgot to mention the illustrious title of Glorified Copy Clerk. Or the ever-exciting Kid Fetch-a-File. Wait until I’m a lawyer, I told myself, then I’ll be the one who makes the paralegals and secretaries run around like headless chickens on a mad scavenger hunt. Hail Mr. Jarvis T. Henders, Esquire, they shall chant unto me. And of course, I will constantly be smoking everyone’s ass with ice-hot verbal zingers. Those documents aren’t going to redact themselves, Colonel Bozo. Chop chop! I couldn’t wait. I was just paying the proverbial dues. And these dues had to be paid because without the paralegal tag on my résumé and some bitchin’ LSAT scores, no half-decent law school would even glance at me sideways. My college grades were nearly toast after my second trip to rehab in three semesters. Or was it three trips in two? Did the one I skip out on after four days even count? Now I was sober and awesome, and with the paralegal cred, I’d be able to form myself into prime lawyer material. It was all part of my Master Plan (the “MP”) to become the stellar legal genius who saves the world, while unceremoniously crushing my adversaries under a brutal iron foot. Also included in the MP was the mega-mansion. The killer speed-boat. State-of-the-art satellite home theater system with triple quadraphonic sound, if they have that. And of course the Italian marble Jacuzzi with high-intensity jets capable of Swedish deep tissue massage—something I could really appreciate after a long hard day of suing people.
Until then, I would have to wade through the beige like a one-eyed robot with a dimming battery pack. I was sick of everything in the world and wanted to die, but overall somehow I actually felt pretty good. Maybe even great. Yeah, definitely real great. Then after lunch I found myself sitting there, zoning out in the cube again. I started thinking about how a vodka tonic sure would cut the boredom. Just one, a little one, to slice through the sterile medicine fog. Just a little teeny tiny one. But as I knew all too well—one becomes five and it doubles from there. Then the army of flying electric space robots comes swarming back in and that was it. Toastville. Some people drink too much and crash their car. I black-out and see flying space robots kickboxing with Zeus at the epicenter of a galaxy-wide nuclear accident hoe-down. Stuff like that. Meanwhile, back in reality, my ass would be getting tossed out of the bar for throwing a wild flurry of random air punches or yakking on a waitress. I was amazed they ever let me back into Cogbill’s.
So I focused my attentions on coffee. Coffee was wholesome. Coffee was real. And what could be more real than its rich dark roasted glory, steaming and eager in the cup, with seven teaspoons of sugar and its promise of unconditional caffeine? Or my beloved instant iced tea, stirred to blackness, keeping me alive, keeping me going.
Keeping me sane.
Keeping the flying space robots out in space where they belong.
I tapped my fingers on the desk and scratched the back of my neck, even though it didn’t itch. I listened for Teeler’s silent whistling but didn’t hear anything. I looked at the clock. Everything is great, I told myself. Really, really great. Soon this general lameness will pass and my world will explode into a stunning electric blossom of awesomeness. Yet the longer this went on, the more it felt like something underneath it all was wrong. Something was off. Something major. I could feel it sloshing around in the raw nerves at the bottom of my stomach like a cluster of evil swamp worms.
And I knew exactly what it was.
Motorcar.
He’d been creeping back into my consciousness lately. Maybe the work tedium had made me vulnerable. I had this nervous stomach condition going back years, and the grotesque thought of Motorcar was like
a cinder block slowly dropping to the bottom of a gurgling death lagoon, otherwise known as my guts. Then it spread out from there like a cloud of nuclear hell waste, all the way from my stomach to my fingernails. There was nothing I could do about it. The only thing that ever helped was getting blitzed.
Motorcar.
Damn him.
Before long I was flirting with the ideas again. The things I could do to him with a shovel. With an axe. A 55-gallon barrel of cyanide. Everything would be fixed if I could have just closed my eyes and died. Unfortunately, that was impossible. So I just swallowed it down and went and got another cup of coffee. And then another cup.
And then another.
2
Carly loved steak. She knew all the cuts. Knew that a New York strip was better than a rib-eye, but nothing could touch an aged, grass-fed, center-cut filet. She was very particular about done-ness, too. In her opinion, anyone who wanted it cooked medium to well-done was an unredeemable pussy. She wanted it as bloody as possible. And washing down each bite with a fine red wine was absolutely mandatory. But I had to skip that part, to her infinite disgust. When she and I were first going out, the steak thing impressed me. Here was a girl who knew what she wanted, and she wanted only the finest in meats. But after about a hundred dates at Eddie’s House of Prime, I wasn’t as impressed. Eddie’s was the most expensive steakhouse in a thirty-mile radius and I was so full of excellent steak I was starting to get puffy cheeks and a spare tire. One time I suggested we go to Outback or J.J.’s Bar-B-Que and you’d have thought I was promoting Cheez-Whiz on Saltines as the featured hors d’oeuvres at her wedding gala.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “Outback? Skank meat.”
“But Eddie. He’s killing my bank account.”
“What bank account?” She laughed at her own hilarity. Then she got all serious. “If you’re gonna be a rich lawyer and treat me to the good life one day, you’d better get used to it now.”
“Yeah. The good life. I’m getting there.”
I ran my finger up and down the non-steak choices. Carly didn’t even need to look at the menu.
“What are you getting?” she asked.
“Oh, I dunno. Chicken fingers?”
“That’s an appetizer.”
“I had a pineapple bacon burger for lunch.”
She rolled her eyes. “Uh…weirdo?”
“What?”
“No, it’s just a little strange that you would eat such a big lunch when you knew we were going out to eat.”
“We always go out to eat.”
She gave me a death look.
“Sorry—I was hungry.”
“But you’re not hungry now are you, dork-wad?” Carly would have smoked me as a lawyer. She was always ready with a holster full of barn-burning zingers. I just sat there and stared at a blank spot on the menu and wished I was someone else.
Carly started tapping a fingernail against her water glass, so I knew she was about to say something. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m getting?” She smiled like it was going to be this earth-shifting, royal surprise.
“What?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t want to guess.”
“Guess anyway.”
“Okay,” I said. “A twelve-ounce strip, bloody.”
“Nope. The filet. Mooing.”
“Right. Still mooing.”
For all Carly’s massive intake of partially cooked beef, she was actually skinny. She was also kill-me-now gorgeous, with these smoky cat eyes that had this way of narrowing and hypnotizing me into giving up ninety-eight percent of all arguments. Her parents had named her for Carly Simon. Whenever she met anyone, she made sure to let them know this, as though she held a claim to some small portion of Ms. Simon’s fame. One time I suggested she have Carly Simon Jr. tattooed on her forehead but she didn’t seem to think that was too funny. And it wasn’t funny because I’d missed my comic timing and it came out sounding mean. She iced over pretty fast and then believe me the booty doorbell was not answered that night. But it’s not like my comic timing was winning any awards in the first place. One of the main reasons I wanted to be a lawyer was so I could master the cutting art of the verbal zinger. Law just seemed like the perfect format within which to master this craft. To be The Zing Master. To be able to completely and totally burn someone with my words. To an unrecognizable crisp. Yeah. Now that was a goal.
We sat there. I was overwhelmed by a strong desire to not speak. I limped through my chicken fingers. My stomach felt like a condemned Soviet-era sewage treatment plant. It wasn’t easy to sit there and watch Carly chew her steak and make “mmm” sounds. She had this whole theory about the art of chewing and how if you chewed a certain way you could peel back secret layers of magical steak flavor. She could’ve written a book on how to chew up meats.
As a big-time caffeine addict, I took long morning coffee breaks, sometimes downing seven or eight cups before noon. And afternoon coffee breaks. Sometimes I had two cups going at once. The coffee at work was low-grade crap, but it was free. I drank higher quality coffee at home. And instant iced tea. These were habits I had picked up in rehab. The road to sobriety for me was navigated on the back of a coffee plantation pack mule. I was also developing a weakness for the pineapple bacon burgers down at Nurgle’s. Anything to color in the beige. I would flirt with secretaries who were old enough to be my mom. Have endless pro sports recaps in the break room with the other guys. They had Facebook blocked but I could play all the video pool or Smoke the Rabbit I wanted. Spend an hour cleaning my fingernails with a toothpick. I even caught myself silently whistling a couple times. Mostly I dreamed of 5:30 and prayed that none of the lawyers would give me an assignment that would put me into overtime.
I was staring into my computer screen one day, formatting this Excel chart I made called Phone Calls by Plaintiff to Langdon Gastrointestinal. There were twenty-seven. I examined one of the entries, wherein the plaintiff guy had called the clinic on a Sunday. Mmm—Sunday, eh? That’s odd—no one calls a clinic on a Sunday unless they’re up to something. There’s the smoking gun right there, yessir, this one’s gonna be a slam dunker. The judge will laugh this trial right out of the courtroom and into the municipal parking lot. Yeppers. But not before I’ve blown them all away with a series of perfectly executed triple ballistic hell zingers, of course. I actually didn’t know anything about the case, but I was practicing for the day when I would be in charge of such things and heroically discovering such smoking guns. I’d be large and in charge, soaring on the silver-tipped wings of kick-ass lawyer glory, burning people left and right, forward and aft. When those thoughts inevitably turned beige, I imagined an even more exhilarating way of making a living, like being one of those guys who travels around the world collecting meteorites and then selling them to rich people on the Internet. The Meteorite Hunter. I’ll install custom display cabinets in the walls of my stylish beach bungalow to display my way sweet collection of space rocks. But after sitting and thinking about being a meteorite hunter ten, twenty, forty times, that idea became a cartoon parody of itself like everything else. I kinda just wanted to be the lucky victim of a fatal train accident. Was that really so much to ask? Probably. So things would come full circle and I’d again take comfort in my dream of becoming a beloved and soul crushing litigation superstar.
One late afternoon when the tedium was about to fully liquefy my brain, I decided to check out the powers of Citizen Search, this cool-ass database we used to track people down, get their real name and any aliases, run background checks, find out if they owned a house, boats, how many cars. It was so awesome. The lawyers used the information against people in civil court to make sure they coughed up all their wealth if they lost the case. Citizen Search had my imagination completely stoked—the whole idea of tracking someone down to exact a cold justice on them. It made me feel like I was this top-secret cyber private eye type dude. I just needed someone to hunt down. But months had gone by and the attor
neys hadn’t giving me anyone to look up. Instead they’d give a four-inch thick stack of papers to stamp CONFIDENTIAL on every page.
And I’d say: “Speaking of confidential, anybody to track down on the old Citizen Search today?”
“Jarvis, I’ll need those documents stamped, scanned and back on my desk no later than four-thirty.”
Gee, thanks.
So I decided to just log on and go for it. First it was ex-girlfriends. Renee, Debbie Danger, Katherine Mosley. Then all the old friends I could think of. Then family members like Uncle Harold, whose secret nickname was Uncle Pie-rold because he used to sit by himself at family gatherings and eat entire pies. He was dead but I still found info on him. Citizen Search nailed all of them. Turns out that Debbie Danger wasn’t so dangerous anymore—married with two kids in Iowa, two cars and a house worth $102,000. Now she was just Mrs. Deborah Huddleston. Wasn’t long before I started running out of people, so I looked up ex-girlfriends’ family members, local news anchors, my landlord. Anyone whose name I could remember. I looked up that lady I got into a car wreck with in ’08. My old boss at Palisades Paintball. Kevin Nobles from high school who got busted for running a crystal meth lab in his grandparents’ garage and was still in jail. And he never even managed to successfully manufacture any meth. When I ran out of real people, I started on movie stars, famous mobsters, dead politicians. I also looked up Dr. Leifer, my old physics professor with the loud, wheezing asthma. Hated that guy. How dare he fail me for showing up to the mid-term wasted on bourbon—didn’t he realize I had a problem? And that Nazi science nerd owned a boat, too.
At some point I really ran out of people. Everybody except one. The one person I was not going to look up on Citizen Search was Motorcar. Or whatever his real name was. It sounded like “Motorcar.” That’s what we called him, anyway. No way I was going to look him up. I wanted to enjoy daydreams of torturing him to death with a weed eater, not learn anything about his actual existence. That would’ve made him too real.
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