The New York

by Bill Branger

  The van started chasing me.

  I was being chased by a goddamned television station van right there in the morning light of downtown Houston. Around us, the usual caravan of cars was trying to pass through various eyes of needles on their way to work, and me and this television van was doing Starsky and Hutch or something.

  Why was I running anyway? I wasn’t a criminal.

  And then I thought of Jack Wade and the IRS man. Maybe George really had deep connections with Washington, D.C., and maybe he could get some revenue man to come down and put the fear on Jack Wade, the jelly doughnut son of a bitch.

  You can see how upset I was. I was blaming everyone for what essentially was my trouble, brought on by my own greed and desire. I am normally much more rational and thoughtful, but I am putting this down exactly the way it was to show that I was no hero in what happened, that I had many, many moments of weakness,

  I finally made it over to the Longhorn Arms and was in my room before the television van found me. The trouble was, there were two other television vans in the parking lot and a car with some guys from the Chronicle. They had staked me out but missed me when I drove up because they didn’t know what kind of a car they were looking for. The Channel 7 driver told them, and I was surrounded.

  Calmly, I packed my big bag and took two cans of MGD out of the icebox and put them in the bag as well. Then I pulled on my black cowboy hat and my long leather coat. I also made sure I had my checkbook and two or three other things I wouldn’t normally carry for a short trip to Los Angeles. Ail the while, I was thinking about getting sympathy from someone, even if I had to pay for it. I decided I needed it that bad. So I made a call to my agent, Sid.

  He was in. Himself.

  “Well, cowboy,” he said, “you’ve screwed yourself up. In one way. You should have consulted me before you did what you did with George.”

  “You weren’t in the mood to be consulted,” I said. “You were tripping over the daisies with that queer quarterback in Hawaii, I recall.”

  “On the other hand,” Sid said. “I can see a TV movie in this. I think a feature is too big. On the other hand, there might be a book if we could find a writer.”

  “I can’t do that stuff. I gotta get out of this thing, Sid “

  “You signed a contract.”

  “I can always retire.”

  “Sure. You could have done that at first. Now it’s harder, but you can do it. You can call a press conference and retire.”

  “Except George is working somehow, you know, with the government in this thing “

  “So?”

  “Well, an IRS agent came by —”

  “I don’t want to know from IRS agents.”

  “Jesus, Sid, what kind of an agent are you?”

  “An ex-agent, as I recall. I recall you became your own agent when you signed that contract. So I became an ‘ex.’ I don’t recall you sending me ten percent.”

  Sid always talked in a calm voice. It’s an agent’s voice. Agents don’t yell or scream, not the good ones. Agents just sit there like a poker player, peeking at the cards, shoving out the cartwheels to the center of the green felt.

  “I’ll send you ten percent.”

  “I don’t want your ten percent. I didn’t earn it.”

  Sid Cohen is like this. He is putting me through a guilt trip. The trouble was, I was feeling guilty about everything on the theory that I must have been guilty of something.

  “Sid, what should I do?”

  “Hey, enjoy the ride. I wish I had been there to make it with you.”

  “I can’t go back on George, he might be able to use the government against me. But I can’t stand this, day after day. There’s three TV vans in the parking lot right now. I just packed my bag.”

  “Packed your bag? Where you going?”

  “Tahiti. I dunno. I gotta get out of here. My girl and I just had a fight and I don’t know why and there ain’t nothing but trouble for me right now in Houston.”

  “Well, it would be better if you told your side of things.”

  “What is my side, exactly?”

  “I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I will,” Sid said.

  “Sid.” My voice was grateful.

  “You want me to be your agent again?”

  “Sid,” I said,

  “I could earn that ten percent,” he said.

  “Sid,” I said.

  “On the other hand, I could have gotten you a better contract. George needed you more than you needed him.”

  “Sid, that isn’t true. George said he could have picked up a Spanish interpreter any place in New York for peanuts.”

  “Oh, I see. Someone to be on the field, position players, make signals in Spanish, be in the locker room after the game. Sure. What did he have in mind? A courtroom interpreter? A Mexican grocer?”

  “He sort of went along those lines.”

  “Ryan, ball players play ball, agents think. I’m thinking right now and the meter is running. We have to come to an understanding,”

  “I understand,” I said.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “They’re here, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “The television guys. Good. You’re pathetic on television, Ryan, did I tell you?”

  “I saw me, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “What you have to do is issue a prepared statement shifting all this back in George’s lap. And the State Department’s lap, too.”

  “Saying what?”

  They were now banging on the door.

  “Saying what?” I said again.

  “I can’t hear you, what is that racket?”

  “I told you, it’s the reporters.”

  “Are they going to bang the door down?”

  “I don’t know, Sid, maybe they are. What should I do?”

  “You have a gun?”

  Sid Cohen is based in L.A. and they are very crazy about guns in that town. Everyone has a gun, and not a shotgun or rifle but a handgun, so they can shoot at each other. Never met anyone hunted with a pistol except my Uncle Dave, who never hit anything but a tree and this farmer once. But Sid is not a gun nut, and I thought he asked me because he has all these prejudices about you, depending on where you come from. I’m from Texas so I wear a gun. That’s their mentality in L.A. when it really is L.A. we have to be scared of.

  “No, Sid, I ain’t got no gun. What d’you think I should do, shoot one of them reporters?”

  “That would put a different spin on the story, all right,” he said in his thoughtful voice. “No. I jest wanted to be sure that if they broke the door down they wouldn’t find anything incriminating like a gun. They already have you labeled as a Commie; you don’t have to be a gun nut, too. Tell you what. I’m flying to Chicago this afternoon to talk with the Cubs, why don’t you meet me there? You could hide out there for a couple of days and 1 could figure out a strategy for you.”

  “I got my car,” I said.

  “You ever hear of airplanes?”

  “I still got my car,” I said.

  “Leave the car at the airport, Ryan. They all have parking lots. Even in Texas. Get a plane for Chicago.”

  “But then they’ll know I’m in Chicago,” I said,

  “The reporters? Simple. Book a flight through to New York with a stopover in Chicago. Slip off the plane in Chicago.”

  “But what do I do with the rest of the ticket?” I said.

  “Donate it to your favorite fucking charity!” Sid was shouting. “I’m not paid enough to think of everything!”

  “Take it easy, Sid.”

  “I’ll be at the Drake Hotel tonight. I meet with the Cubs tomorrow all day. I can see you tonight and we can work out a statement. I’ll draw up a draft on the light to O’Hare.”

  “Can you get me out of this, Sid?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Silence. Sid was letting me twist.

  “Sid.”

  “The only thing I can
guarantee …,” Sid said.

  “Yeah?”

  “… is we can put George Bremenhaven in the middle of it. The arrogant cocksucker, he thinks he’s going to get rid of agents by trading with Cuba, he’s got another think coming.”

  And I was relieved all of a sudden, despite the pounding at the door and despite the fight with Charlene.

  It never occurred to me that this might be personal for agents as well.

  11

  Chasing out to the airport was a hoot, me and the three TV vans, but I got there a good ten minutes before them and took the first plane to anywhere. First fun I’d had in days, punching along at 90 and 100, watching them old vans in my rearviews fall behind.

  Anywhere turned out to be Kansas City, which figures. I thought of looking up that wise-ass reporter who showed off his fancy knowledge of different kinds of Spanish, but I didn’t. In fact, it amused me more now. I bet George didn’t know when he hired me that I only spoke Spanish with Mexicans and that Mexican Spanish wasn’t like Cuban Spanish.

  While I waited around in the K.C. airport for the next plane to Chicago, I tried to think of everything I knew about Cubans.

  I knew about Castro. Everyone knew about him. Wore a beard, smoked cigars, wore an army uniform to bed at night, and gave long speeches. He played baseball once. Pitcher. But I didn’t know anything else.

  Ricky Ricardo. Lucy’s husband. Now I was getting someplace. Come to think of it, he spoke lousy English all his life. Part of the fun of watching the “I Love Lucy” reruns was trying to figure out what Ricky was saying, How could someone spend all those years in America and not speak better English?

  Take Mexicans. They pick up English fast and good, and you give a Mexican enough rope and he’ll talk better English than they do in Detroit.

  So maybe the smart-ass from the Kansas City Star who once wanted to hang me for accidentally beaning one of their players was right. Maybe George had hired me on to do something I couldn’t do — speak Spanish with Cubans the same way they can’t speak English to us, even if they’ve been here a million years.

  That thought kept me tickled all the way to Chicago. I took a cab downtown to the Drake Hotel and checked in without even looking at the room rate. I looked up Sid, but he wasn’t in yet so I left a message for him.

  Next, I called Charlene at work to ask her to forgive me. But she was taking the day off. I called her at her apartment, but she was taking the day off from there, too.

  Then I had a sudden and brilliant and sickening inspiration.

  I called her at Ernie’s Cafe.

  She came to the phone. She sounded fuzzy around the edges, which I know is the way she sounds when she’s been crawling around inside a bottle of Smirnoff long enough. She is not a drunk, but she can drink when she wants to.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Chicago.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m gonna meet with Sid here.”

  “And do what?”

  “I dunno. Sid hasn’t figured it out yet.”

  “Fuck Sid,” she said. I could hear the weave in her voice.

  “Charlene. You drinking alone?”

  “I drink with whoever I want.”

  “Who you drinking with?”

  “Jack Wade, if you want to know.”

  That’s what I mean about having an inspiration that was both intelligent and sickening.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Ryan Patrick, I am free, white, and over twenty-one, and I drink with whoever I want and wherever I want.”

  “Just don’t go to bed with him,” I said. This was the wrong thing to say. I knew it when I said it. There was a long silence.

  And then: “We were talking about you, you shit.”

  “Charlene, I called to tell you I was sorry.”

  “That ain’t saying ‘I’m sorry,’ saying don’t sleep with the first man buys you a drink in Ernie’s Cafe, man you knew since college, man with a wife and two little children.”

  “It’s just that he’s a car salesman,” I said.

  “And it’s just that you’re a broken-down ball player who everyone in the country right now thinks is a Communist and a scab. If I didn’t know better and know you’re just dumb, I’d think it, too.”

  “So what does Jack think?”

  “Jack thinks you need a lawyer,”

  “Sid is a lawyer.”

  “He’s an agent more than a lawyer.”

  “Well, I don’t need two lawyers.”

  “I didn’t say you needed one lawyer. I said Jack said you need a lawyer. I told Jack he was Ml of shit,” Charlene said. “I said what you need to do is cut your losses and go out and resign and maybe punch George in the nose for the hell of it to do what you should’ve done last Thanksgiving if you remember I told you.”

  She was stringing her words together as carefully as a drunk putting popcorn kernel by kernel on a needle and thread to form a decoration for the Christmas tree.

  “Charlene, I feel terrible about everything, just everything. But mostly, I feel terrible about walking out on you that way.”

  This produced more silence. Was she figuring I hadn’t said enough? Or too much? it is hard to tell with a woman’s silence which is intended.

  I said, “Can you just let me apologize?”

  “I thought you just did that.”

  “Well, I didn’t hear nothing from your end.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, you accept my apology.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Does that mean you didn’t?”

  “It don’t mean anything.”

  “I wish you would go home, Charlene, and get a good night’s sleep and I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “You do? I figure to go on drinking until I can’t stand up and depend on Jack to take me home.”

  “That would be a mistake. I wouldn’t trust Jack to take Mother Teresa home.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say, Ryan. You judge everyone by your own standards, which are none too high. Or so it seems from everything I been reading about you in the papers and on the TV. They say you beaned a ball player once and got suspended. You never told me that.”

  “Charlene, you know me more than a year. You know —”

  “I know that you told me some things and I know that you convinced me there is no Miss Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey. I don’t know any more than that.”

  “You know I love you.”

  Now, I am not a glib talker and I do not go out of my way to say “I love you” to ladies I meet and even might go to bed with. The ladies and I have an understanding that if we meet up after a game someplace — say like Toronto, after a game — we have a couple of hours to decide to do it or not. Mostly the ladies decide by the look of me and whether there’s kink in me and whether I hold my liquor, and I decide if the girl is honestly sincere about having fun or one of those naggy kinds of groupies who’ll end up selling her story to the National Enquirer I haven’t done that for a while — like I told Charlene, it was the truth — but I used to. I am thirty-eight years old, after all. I ain’t a stud, but I ain’t a virgin. And I never told Charlene I loved her before — well, maybe once — so I guess I meant it.

  “I don’t know that, Ryan,” she said after a moment. Her voice was soft then, and sober-sounding, though that was impossible if she had been drinking with Jack Wade a whole boozy afternoon.

  “Well, I mean it.”

  “You never said it before.”

  “Which proves I mean it.”

  “Like the telephone operator proves there’s no Miss Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “It’s all right. Don’t say anything. I’m going home now. Call me in the morning,” she said.

  It was good enough. Not great. But good enough.

  “Safe home,” I said.

  "I'll be fine.”

  “If yo
u can’t drive, let Jack drive you.”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “Is he that drunk?” I said.

  “Ryan. He’s a car salesman,” she said, and hung up.

  12

  Sid Cohen is tan, tall, has a great toupee — the kind you can wear in a pool that is all tied to your real hair — and wears sunglasses all the time, He never says “baby” to you, because it doesn’t fit the role of a sports agent. Other than that, he is pure Santa Monica in Los Angeles and is not to be trusted kissing babies,

  I mostly got along with Sid in my salad years in the league because when he went out on the edge, I pulled him back in. Some players get with agents who think they’re representing King Kong. There are no King Kongs except for maybe a Michael Jordan or Shaquille or Bonds, or a couple of others. The rest of us are higher-grade replacement parts from Mr. Goodwrench or we’re down-and-dirty knockoffs from the discounters. Notice I mentioned basketball players being among the King Kongs. Big difference with 12 men on a team compared with 25, like in baseball, or 47, like in football. The stars get fewer, the bigger the night sky.

  I knew that and made Sid know that I knew that. Sid always said I held myself back, but I kept making money, which is more than some wannabes made sitting out the seasons.

  We met at a table in the Coq d’Or, which is a brassy little bar on the ground floor of my hotel. I had a beer and Sid had an iced tea and a salad. Angelenos in the show biz business eat very little of substance and never really look healthy except to one another, if they were cows in Texas, they’d be shot in a pit and burned.

  “You looking good, Sid,” I said. It was omelette time again.

  “Hmmph,” Sid said, gnawing at his lettuce. It was winter in Chicago and the salad did not meet California standards. Sid chewed on grimly like a rabbit in a wire cage waiting to be potluck. It was all the rabbit knew how to do, even though it was going to come to no good end. I felt so sorry for myself I ordered a steak on toast and a mound of french fries because Charlene wasn’t around to smell meat on my breath.