by Paul O'Brien
Down a dark alley, past three boarded doorways, and beyond a mountain of trash, they were at Babu’s home. It wasn’t what Lenny had expected, but having spent so long inside, he wasn’t even sure that what he was taking in was reality.
When he left, Babu was one of the most recognizable faces in the country. He’d had national talk show exposure, women, money, and fame.
Lenny didn’t want to judge a book by its cover, but it looked like that was all gone, now.
Through the flickering inspection of the overhead lights, Lenny could see that his stab wound wasn’t anything to panic over. He’d need stitches, but his shoulder didn’t feel like anything was severed inside.
Babu pulled the van up against the wall.
“We’re home,” Babu said simply, as he gingerly lowered himself out of the van.
Lenny followed his huge frame through the creaky wooden door. He immediately knew that Babu wasn’t alone: the house had the smell of cooking, which hadn’t visited Lenny in many, many years.
“Up those stairs, there’s a room, and a place to wash,” Babu said as he entered the kitchen.
His place was small for a giant, but it was well kept and warm, and it had a woman’s touch.
“I’ll be okay,” Lenny answered.
He was unsure of whether he should follow Babu into the kitchen, but he took baby steps in that direction, just in case.
“We can’t leave that shoulder like it is,” Babu said.
Lenny peered around the door into the kitchen, and could see a steaming bowl of soup in front of an empty seat. Babu was fixing a second bowl for himself.
“Sit,” Babu said.
Lenny dragged the chair away from the table and sat. He was getting a sense of Babu’s home, now. It felt like what Lenny thought of as European: there was a small fire crackling in the corner of the kitchen, the beams from the roof were exposed, and there was a rail of pots and pans hanging from hooks above the cooker.
Lenny sat and took a second to digest the smell of the meal before it touched his lips. It was genuinely enough to make him emotional there and then.
He was out. All of that shit that had happened to him had changed his life, but he was out, now, in New York, and with Babu, again.
They were different men, but they were both hugely familiar with each other.
Lenny slid his spoon around the edge, and blew on it as it rose to his lips. Babu sat next to him. Lenny didn’t want to put the spoon down.
“Let me see,” Babu said.
Lenny tried to show his wound and eat at the same time. Babu tore open Lenny’s stained and ripped t-shirt. The wound was still wet and exposed, but it was nothing major: a clean-cut wound.
Babu rose again, and began to rummage through the drawers and little boxes in the kitchen.
Lenny took the opportunity to wolf down what was left in front of him. He instantly regretted slapping Tanner; he knew that he should have just bitten his tongue, and walked away with the money. If he had done that, he would surely be on his way home, by now.
“I have no idea what I’m going to do about anything,” Lenny replied.
Babu sat back down. He had a tube of superglue between his huge sausage fingers that made him look clumsy, and the tube tiny.
“I’ll...” Lenny said as he took the tube for himself.
Babu wiped his hands along his shirt, and proceeded to pinch Lenny’s wound closed. Lenny then applied the glue along the cut line, careful not to get Babu stuck there, too.
“From a political point of view, they have to come for you now,” Babu said. “They can’t have anyone putting their hands on a boss.”
“Even another boss?”
Babu peeked up from the wound to see that Lenny was smiling.
“We can stall them, bullshit them, and dodge them, but even then we only have a couple of weeks to get the territory moving.”
Lenny finished applying the glue. “So, what’s your plan?”
Babu took the tube of glue, and put it back in the drawer. “I’m still working on it.”
Lenny walked down the tight hallway to the small bathroom. He had no idea how Babu fitted in there. As he walked, he couldn’t help but be pulled back by the girlishness of the bedroom he’d just passed.
It had a huge bed with both pillows and cushions on it, and there was a hamburger-shaped telephone beside the bed. The decor everywhere was different from what Lenny knew, but he couldn’t help but notice the amount of lace everywhere.
He was sorely tempted to go into the room and have a closer look, but he made himself move onward to the bathroom. It wasn’t his place to be nosy, or to pry into someone else’s private life.
Lenny needed a shower and rest. He had to try to get his head right, or at least right enough to catch up with what was happening. He had no idea where to go, or what to do, and he had no idea who he could trust.
As he turned on the water and locked himself into the bathroom, Babu made a call that Lenny couldn’t hear.
“Joe?” Babu said down the phone.
“What the fuck is going on out there?” Joe asked.
“You need to pull Tanner, do you hear me?” Babu said, “Get him off the field any way you have to.”
“Where’s Lenny?”
Babu thought carefully about his answer. “I’ve got him, but I need more time. He’s too scared to do anything because of Tanner, that asshole...”
“Just fucking get it done,” Joe shouted.
Babu took a quick look to make sure he was still speaking in private. “They beat him and stabbed him, Joe. He’s talking about going to magazines, again, and telling them the whole story.”
“He’s what?”
“I won’t let that happen under any circumstance. Do you hear me?”
There was a pause.
“Yeah.”
“I have to earn his trust, again. Just make sure that nothing else happens here, Joe.”
“I’ll deal with Tanner.”
The water on Lenny’s face smelled different. The privacy of a shower with a locked bathroom door allowed for the rolling waves of emotion and guilt to overcome him. He felt the fear of being out, and the anger of being inside. He now had the space to cry silent, small, whimpering tears.
Lenny’s legs weren’t as strong as they had been a minute before. His bones were protesting, and his wounds and bruises were sore. He missed the home he had in his head. Sometimes a flicker of reality would cut into his thoughts, and tell him that home was nothing like he remembered or wanted; home hated him, and didn’t want him around. Home was just a place he imagined, and that was the thought that leveled him. It made Lenny kneel in the shower, and forced his tears to grow bigger as the pain of failure swelled within him. He had been avoiding this thought for twelve years, while he retreated into his head and made everyone in his life disappear.
It was this thought that made Lenny run.
He grabbed his clothes, carefully opened the door, and went to the nearest window.
Wrestling needed things from him, but so did his family.
Or, at least, he hoped so.
CHAPTER SIX
“Let me smarten you up.”
In wrestling, this phrase meant everything. A veteran saying those words was like a magician telling a rookie all of his tricks. It involved a lot of trust—a lot of faith that the person learning would take on the old traditions, the proper way of doing things.
They would have to protect the secrets of the wrestling business.
On this night, the rookie was a young, handsome wrestler named Kid Devine. The ‘magician’ was sitting about twenty rows back, covered by darkness in The World’s Most Famous Arena.
“Can we let the people in? They’re starting to go crazy out there,” the front-of-house manager shouted.
“No,” the man in the stands said, “A few more minutes.”
Madison Square Garden was lit for wrestling, which simply meant that, except for the twenty by twenty red, white, and
blue ring, everything was dark.
Kid tried to look beyond the lights. “Why don’t you come in here and show me something, old man? It’s been a while.”
The man in the stands struck a match for his cigarette, and Kid caught a glimpse of his pained, pale face.
“You okay?” Kid asked.
The man took a pull from his cigarette, and began, “There are four basic parts to a wrestling match: the Shine, the Heat, the Comeback, and the Finish. The Shine is where our hero starts off well, and wins a couple of small, early victories to get the crowd excited. They paid good money, so give them what they want.”
He took another pull.
“To start with.”
Kid ducked to get out of the ring.
“You can stay where you are,” the man in the stands said.
Kid stayed in the ring, but he had no idea why he couldn’t go see his mentor.
“The second part of the match is the Heat, and this is where it begins to go wrong for our hero. The heel sees an opportunity to win, and he takes it. It’s the part of the match that the audience decides whether the baby-face hero is worth supporting.”
“Seriously, man. What are you doing up there? I can’t see you,” Kid asked.
“This part of the match is when bad things happen to good people.”
New York.
1984.
One day after Lenny got out.
Tad Stolliday fucking loved his job. While some people would say they enjoy being employed, or that they don’t mind their work, Tad would have come in every morning to do his job for free. Being in charge of people actually made him feel better, as a human being.
Tad was the kid who everyone else hated when they were kids. He was the kind who would go tell the adults on the other kids if they skipped the line, or gave someone a wedgie.
He was too much of a pussy to be a cop, and too fond of himself to be a security guard, so he followed the road that best suited him: he was born to be a parole officer.
Today, however, was a bad day at the office. Word was coming down from the executive director of the State Division of Parole that a parolee had just shot a cop, and wounded two others. The governor of New York, along with the mayor, had both called into question the effectiveness of the parole system in total.
“Tighten up on these cunts,” was the director’s supposed reaction.
Tad didn’t need to be told twice. He was sitting in his home, waiting for 9 a.m. to come. He gave his shoes an extra shine that morning, and his tie was extra pressed. The executive director wanted tightening, and Tad wanted to impress.
No coffee was needed, and his press-ups were done. Well, that’s what he’d tell the boys at the office. Truth be told, he loved the Raquel Welch video, Total Beauty and Fitness. There was something about the breathless voiceover and synchronized breathing that pepped him up in the morning. His moustache was groomed and trimmed, and his breakfast was squashed and scrambled.
This was going to be an awesome day.
Tad Stolliday couldn’t wait to talk to parolee number one, Mr. Lenard Long.
“Hey, hey! Stop that guy. Stop that guy!” roared the overweight taxi driver, as Lenny jumped fences, cars, and cut through lanes to get away.
He felt like an asshole running out on a fare, but he had no choice.
He’d stayed awake all of the night before, and had waited for the morning to arrive before he made his journey back to Queens. He didn’t want to knock on the door in the middle of the night; he wanted to wait and make everything seem a little more normal, or as normal as it could be. Lenny knew that seeing him at the door at any time of the day was going to be enough of a shock, but daytime would be much better. He had moved from bus shelter to bus shelter—depending on the noise, as well as whether someone else was already there—until the sun came up.
Lenny had written the address hundreds of times, but he’d never been there before. He knew that Long Island City wasn’t the safest of neighborhoods, but now he could see it, with its riverbanks strewn with twisted metal and forgotten debris. It looked to him like an industrial area, but with the morning smell of bakeries setting up for the day.
Lenny hadn’t wanted to run, but seeing Babu and Ricky whispering in the dark had made Lenny think about how real this all was, again. When he was inside, that had been the real world, and everything over the walls wasn’t really happening—not so much that it couldn’t be fixed in some way.
Now that he was out, everything had quickly flipped.
Lenny walked up to the small, rectangular garden, and knew straight away that his father lived there. There were seashells pressed into the grass as a border all around, but in the middle was Lenny’s wife’s faded gnome.
Seeing it made Lenny well up—it was the last piece left of his own home, and his father had kept it. Lenny tried to imagine what it would be like to put that in his own garden, again: a family garden.
He was a long way away from knowing.
Lenny approached the door, and knocked on the flimsy frame. The house was small, and it was almost as if people didn’t actually live in it.
“Hello?” asked Edgar from inside.
“It’s me, Pop.”
“Lenard?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m out.”
Edgar took a second to process the words, but then he hurriedly twisted some of the locks the wrong way, and some the right way. The key was in the door.
“I can’t... wait, Son,” Edgar said. “I need to get...”
“It’s okay,” Lenny said, looking behind him to see if it really was okay for his old man to take his time.
Edgar opened the door, but not too wide. He had glasses on his face, and his hair was thinning. He was smaller, and in his early sixties.
“Pop,” Lenny said, with his arms outstretched.
Edgar was totally confused; he’d thought that his son had many more years to go. “Lenard?”
Edgar and Lenny hugged on his porch, but Edgar swiftly moved his boy into the house.
“I got out,” Lenny said.
“But what happened to you?”
Lenny had nearly forgotten about his face, and the dry blood stains on his ripped clothes.
“You’re different-looking,” Edgar blurted out.
Lenny had never felt more self-conscious. “I... got... it’s nothing. Honestly.”
Edgar seemed nervous about letting Lenny into his house, but he couldn’t say no. “The place is a mess.”
Lenny stepped in, and his father closed a couple of the internal doors, like he didn’t want Lenny to look around too much. The table was set for breakfast with three place settings.
“Are you expecting someone?” Lenny asked.
He could hear the voices of people approaching the front door, and he could see that his father was totally flustered.
“Who is it?” Lenny asked.
What else could Edgar do, besides tell the truth? “It’s your family.”
Lenny instinctively stooped down, and made his way for one of the doors.
“Don’t you want to see them?”
Lenny wanted it more than anything in the whole world. “Not like this,” he replied.
Just as Lenny closed the door from the kitchen to the hallway, he heard a voice call “Granddad” from the door.
“Thank you so much, again, Edgar,” said another voice—her voice.
She was only a few feet away from Lenny, but she would never even know that he was there. Her voice was soothing; it took everything he had to not stand up and open the door.
He knew what he looked like, though, and he knew that he had nothing to offer—again. He was just a fuck-up of a man, looking for shelter from his father, and running from trouble, without even knowing how much danger he was in.
He wasn’t going to be like that for her ever again.
“Can I put this down in my room?” the boy asked. It could only have been James Henry.
“Not right now, Jimmy,” Edgar rep
lied. “Wash your hands in the kitchen.”
Lenny noted that he liked to be called Jimmy, now. So, Jimmy it was.
“You look really good, Bree,” Edgar said.
“Thank you. You too.”
“Was it a long way down? I’m not familiar with your new place, yet.”
Lenny was listening intently. He needed to know where his family had ended up.
“Just a couple of hours. This house isn’t that out of the way. We haven’t got the TV set up, yet, so he’s a little...”
“You know, I would have come up there and got you guys.”
“Thank you, but I have some other things to do before I head back, anyway,” Bree replied.
Lenny sat on the floor of his father’s hallway, and listened to his family eat, laugh, and look after each other. It was like a prison dream to him, still: he was so close to being a part of that again, but he still wasn’t.
Hearing them made him feel content. It made him want to be better, and be accepted. They passed each other juice, and asked if anyone wanted more of anything.
They talked about Bree’s new place, and about another school for Jimmy. Their oldest son, Luke, was a man, now.
It was a morning of catching up, and small talk, and it was all that Lenny needed to feel better.
“Are you sure you don’t want something to take with you for your trip?” Edgar asked Bree.
The sound of dishes being stacked let Lenny know that breakfast was over, and that they were all starting to move. Lenny needed to plot, just in case, but he wanted to hear a little more.
“No, thank you, Edgar. I’m going into the city to meet Luke for a little while.”
“Can I see him, too, Mom?” Jimmy asked.
“How is he? He doesn’t come over here, anymore,” Edgar said.
“Can I see Luke?” Jimmy asked again.
“Wait in the car, son,” Bree said to Jimmy.
Lenny could hear the front door open, as Jimmy left the adults alone.
Bree answered. “Luke is quiet, as usual. He doesn’t say much. He seems to be working here and there, and doing okay for himself in the city.”