Casino Moon hcc-55

by Peter Blauner

  There were two knocks on the dressing room door. “The sign says do not disturb,” she called out. “The bathroom is downstairs.”

  She wriggled out of her bathing suit and put two sticks of gum in her mouth. Pain shot through her jaw as soon as she started chewing and she had to spit it out right away. The whole time she was married she never caught a beating like this. But then that was all mental torture, after he closed up inside. Long stony silences over dinner and mornings shooting up in the bathroom. She still remembered waiting for him in bed and staring out the window at a gray sky where the seagulls looked like eraser marks.

  It was awful to abuse yourself like that. Not that she’d mind a drink herself, her jaw aching like it was. But everyone was on her to watch her weight these days. It was bad enough she had the cesarean scar showing when she wore a bikini. She told the shift manager, just let me wear the one-piece. But he said, no, fuck it, wear the bikini, the customers are too drunk to notice the scar. But watch the cellulite, he told her. A customer wants to see cottage cheese thighs, he can go home and look in the mirror. Maybe she could get herself one of those Richard Simmons exercise videos and a can of Ultra Slim-Fast.

  What did they all want from her anyway? She was the only girl over thirty on her shift and as far as she knew the only one with a kid. So for all that, she didn’t look too bad, did she?

  There was the knock at the door again. A little more urgent this time. Probably some drunk trying to use the bathroom.

  “Sir, are you hard of hearing?” she called out. “The john is downstairs.”

  She pulled on her blouse and jeans and began brushing her hair up while looking in the mirror. She was starting to hate these little in-between moments. They gave her too much time to think about how things were going.

  On good nights, a secret dream of moving out west and finding a new career kept her alive. On bad nights, she’d pretend her life was happening to someone else.

  Tonight, she wished she’d brought her Walkman. That way she could listen to her own music and block out everything else: the crap they were playing on the speakers outside, the things men would say in the parking lot. Who needed the aggravation? Sometimes she wished she had a Walkman on all the time. That way she could take care of Kimmy, her mother and the two jobs without any distractions.

  She finished teasing her hair, put on her sneakers, and went out to the bar, looking for some ice to put on her cheekbone before it started to swell up.

  The place was almost empty now. A blue etherish light reflected off the smoked mirrors and an old Hall and Oates song played over the loudspeakers. The drunk who’d been pounding on her door was stumbling out into the parking lot, probably looking for a good Hyundai to piss on.

  The guy totaling up receipts behind the bar was the cute one she’d noticed before. With the dark brown eyes and the longish hair he could’ve pulled back into a ponytail. Anthony, she’d heard someone call him.

  “How about some ice, Anthony?” she said, hearing her mother’s arch, almost formal sound in her voice. “I’m turning into a cyclops.”

  “Yeah, you might want to put a slab of meat on that.” He smiled and gave her a glass full of cubes. “Or how about a drink? You look like you had a rough night up there.”

  “Don’t tempt me. I’ve got to get up with my kid in the morning.”

  He tapped a couple more buttons on the register and put down his receipts. “You got a kid?”

  “Yes. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged and she decided he must be eight years younger than her. Probably the nephew of one of the goons who ran this place. “It’s just surprising, that’s all. You don’t expect somebody who does what you do to have kids.”

  “Well I could say the same about you,” she said with a crooked smile. “I thought everybody who worked behind the counter here had something to do with the mob. But you don’t look like any gangster to me.”

  He winced, just a bit.

  “So what are you anyway? The hired help or part of the Corleone family?” She glanced back at the booth where Teddy usually sat.

  “Just trying to pay some bills.”

  “I hear that.”

  She took out her wallet and showed him a picture of Kimmy smiling that guileless toothless four-year-old smile that made her feel teary-eyed and fiercely protective at the same time.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said. “I’ve got two of my own. I’d kill for them.”

  “All I have to do is wrestle other women.” She crossed her legs and showed him the bruise down by her ankle. “Every time I get one of these, I tell myself I’m paying for braces.”

  “You sound like someone else I know.” He leaned over the bar to look down, seeming to take in the smell of her. “Another fighter.”

  She decided he was sweet, even if he was the nephew of a Mafioso. Too bad about the wedding ring he was wearing, though.

  “That’s the life of the single parent,” she said, letting her hair fall back. “Everything’s do or die. Half my paycheck goes for insurance. They ought to have a Purple Heart for mothers.”

  “So maybe I can help you out one of these days.”

  “And how are you going to do that?” She lit a Merit, enjoying the attention without taking it too seriously.

  A gruff-looking older man with unruly gray hair was watching them from the other end of the bar.

  “Well, you know.” Anthony glanced at him once and looked back at her. “Something could come up,” he said in a quiet voice you’d use to tell your best friend your deepest secret.

  “Like what?”

  He looked from side to side again and then peeked under the counter, like he was expecting to find a surveillance mike among the dirty glasses. “Remember Elijah Barton, the old middleweight champion?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Was this a boxer he was talking about?

  “Well I could be getting a chance to co-manage him in a title fight this fall. At one of the casinos.”

  “Oh. Huh.”

  “Maybe I could get you a little work on the side, you know. Something a little more kinda dignified.”

  He suddenly stopped talking, as if he was worried about offending her. She decided she really did have a little crush on him. Even if he was full of those silly dreams people talked about after-hours. She’d once dated a bartender who thought he was going to be the next Engelbert Humperdinck. He ended up stacking records in a jukebox.

  “So why are you so anxious to help me out?” she said, humoring him. “You don’t even know my name.”

  “It’s Rosemary. Right?”

  “Rosemary Giordano.” She gave him her hand. The warmth from his palm went right up her arm and into her heart.

  “Well, Rosemary,” he said, letting go of her hand and sitting back on a stool behind the bar. “You seem like the kind of person who’s had a couple of bad breaks in life.”

  “Whatever. I guess so.” She checked her watch. Half past twelve. Her mother would be asleep by now. Too late to pick up the kid. Rosemary would have to sleep over there herself, with the noisy old fan in the window and the neighbors arguing next door.

  “I’ve had a couple of bad breaks too,” Anthony was saying. “So I figure us bad-break people ought to stick together.”

  “It’s a deal.” She stood up, making sure her handbag was closed. “As soon as you get your fight together, I’ll be there to sing the national anthem with bells on.”

  “Now you’re laughing, but you’ll see. This is going to work out with the fight. I’m going to end up helping you.”

  “And what did I do to deserve such luck?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, suddenly turning serious. “There was something about the way you fought tonight. With so much heart.”

  She looked hard at him again to see if he was kidding, but couldn’t catch a glimmer of a smile.

  It was time to go. The song on the sound system had changed to a hit from a few years back. �
��Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you,” it went. She didn’t want it to mean anything, but it made her think of the good times when she was married, before the eraser-mark skies and the syringes in the sink.

  “The way you fought,” Anthony repeated. He touched his chest with his fist as if to say he was out of words. “I’ll never forget it.”

  11

  “CAMILLE, GET ME another piece of that carrot cake, will you?”

  Teddy sat at the kitchen table with a forest green composition book balanced on his lap. His wife brought him some more dessert and tiptoed away like a terrorist leaving a car bomb.

  “Next time bring me a slice with more icing on it.”

  He ate half the piece in less than a minute and then turned to the page marked “Income.” He picked up a pen and began to write in a slow, childlike scrawl. L.S. (for loan-sharking)—$1257 for the week. Policy—$941. More than $1250 from Ralphie Sasso at the hotel workers’ union, but with Jackie from New York claiming Ralphie was his now, there wouldn’t be any more where that came from.

  Teddy turned and looked at the telephone on the wall. “Come on, ring, you motherfucker, ring already.”

  It was after twelve and the people from the Commission still hadn’t called back. He couldn’t believe they’d just taken away half his power without asking him. Snatching Ralphie and the union from him. He felt like he was walking around with his arms cut off.

  “They wanna play games, we’ll play games,” he muttered in a grinding, vindictive voice. “This will not stand.”

  “Is this about those gentlemen who came from New York this afternoon?” his wife asked.

  “Yeah, Camille. They’re real gentlemen. You’re a real shrewd judge of character.”

  “That was lovely hair the younger one had.”

  Teddy just glared at her.

  He had a momentary urge to take a leak, but decided to let it pass. He was getting up three, four times a night lately, but the stream was just a trickle. He told himself it was nothing worth talking to a doctor about.

  He turned to the page marked “Disbursements” and took another bite out of the carrot cake. There were fewer names here than there used to be. Only two dozen men were left in his crew. And since he tried to have his bookkeeper Buddy Milito whacked for cheating him, Teddy had been forced to keep the records himself, painstakingly transcribing each figure from the crumpled-up slips crew members gave him into the composition book.

  He paused and finished the piece of cake on his plate, noticing he’d given his niece Carla three thousand dollars in the last six months.

  “Camille,” he said. “Get me another piece of cake. And bring me some grappa while you’re at it.”

  “You sure you haven’t had enough?” she asked meekly.

  He stared at her until she backed up into the kitchen like a dog afraid of being hit with a rolled-up newspaper.

  The truth was he never got enough. Not since his days in the reform schools and foster homes. Food seemed to fill some deep gnawing need inside him. On the long winter nights, after he was first exiled to Atlantic City, he took solace gorging himself on cheese-steak hoagies the way other men stuck needles in their arms. And when things turned around and he became a boss, he indulged himself at the best Italian restaurants in town.

  Still it wasn’t enough. He went back to writing on the disbursements page as his twenty-three-year-old retarded daughter Kathy knocked over something upstairs.

  “There she goes again.” He grimaced. “What’s the matter with her?”

  His wife brought him the grappa and another piece of cake, with her head bowed. “She’s been having spells, kind of. She keeps asking for Charlie.”

  Teddy looked up at her and felt something tear in his chest. “Why’s she doing that? She fuckin’ knows he’s dead.”

  “I dunno.” His wife began to cry again. “I guess she still misses him.”

  Teddy took a sip of grappa and went back to writing. “Well go look in on her. Make sure she isn’t breaking any of them German car radios we left in her room.”

  He shook his head as his wife floated out of the kitchen in a haze of barbiturates. If she wasn’t out of her mind on pills these days, she was crying herself blind with grief. The memory of Charlie was the only thing that mattered to her anymore.

  When Teddy thought back on the boy, it was in isolated moments of not knowing what to say. To Charlie on the floor, watching TV. Charlie spending too much time alone in his room. Charlie coming home late with a split lip and bloodshot eyes.

  Teddy once controlled half the unions and most of the drug trade in town, but he could never find the nerve to ask his only son if he was shooting dope. Thinking it over now, he didn’t blame himself for the boy’s suicide, but he wasn’t sure who else to hold responsible. So he settled for raging at the rest of the world a little bit every day.

  Mosquitoes flew into the zapper on the porch and fried themselves. Nighttime traffic rumbled by. And the phone remained silent. The Commission people had abandoned him.

  He turned back to the income page and looked in the shoebox under the table, thinking there must be more money somewhere. Maybe some slips were misplaced. He couldn’t believe they were getting squeezed this tight. He turned back to the disbursements page and saw he’d given his lawyer Burt Ryan seven thousand dollars in the last two months without Burt making a single court appearance. With the racketeering indictment due any day, that number was sure to double or triple.

  That yawning void opened inside him again. He quickly finished the grappa and stuffed down the rest of his carrot cake, feeling the satisfied ache in his gut. He shut the book, thinking he could handle only so much suffering in one night.

  He walked through his wife’s bedroom, taking off his shirt and pants, and went into his smaller green bedroom on the north side of the house. He lay down on the sofa bed and watched the leaves outside form shaking shadows on his ceiling. He hoped sleep would come quickly, before the hunger returned again.

  12

  I DIDN’T WANT TO waste time learning the ropes, soI asked John B. to introduce me to the top people in boxing right away. On a cool blue Friday afternoon, he brought me over to a press conference at the Golden Doubloon Casino at the Boardwalk.

  The first guy we met in the Admiral’s Ballroom was an executive named Sam Wolkowitz. I’d seen him on cable TV being interviewed before the fights. He was a senior vice president at the corporate outfit that helped sponsor these events. His company was part of a vast global communications network that included $75 million movies, several huge record divisions, four or five publishing companies, and the most massive interactive computer system in the world. In other words, the kind of contact I’d been trying to make all my life.

  “Nice to meet you.” I grabbed his hand and shook it.

  He just looked at me with twinkling blue eyes. He wore a beautifully tailored brown Hugo Boss suit, a custom-made white shirt with a light red stripe and French cuffs, and a hand-painted tie I would’ve strangled for. His hair was cut short and neat and his ears stuck out like a Toyota with both doors open. After a couple of seconds, I realized he was still looking at me, expecting me to say something, but my mind had gone blank.

  “You, ah, you look much better than you do on TV,” I said finally.

  His eyes narrowed and the left corner of his mouth turned up. He must have thought I was coming on to him. I started to flush with embarrassment.

  Fortunately, John B. interrupted. “My man, Mr. Sam,” he said, pushing the brim back on the cowboy hat he was wearing that day. “I got a proposition to discuss with you.”

  Since the subject was his brother, the champ, John was in his confident mode. The other corner of Sam Wolkowitz’s mouth came up, but it still looked like he was sneering.

  “A proposition?” he said. “I hope this isn’t another one of those complicated arrangements that you suggested we try in Anaheim last year.”

  “Oh no, not like that!” Jo
hn B. said with a laugh so hearty it made his eyes bulge and his knees bend.

  For all I knew, John B. had suggested they try going to bed with the same hooker in Disneyland. I smiled like I’d been along for the ride.

  “No, this is serious.” John straightened up. “You know, my brother and I been talking about this opening you got coming up with the fight this fall.”

  “Hmm,” said Sam. His face was like a blank computer screen.

  “You know, he’s been training awful hard, my brother.” John B. dipped his head in admiration. “And when he was at his best, there wasn’t another like Elijah. He had people come up to him, every airport, every city, just to tell him he was the greatest inspiration to their lives. So we was wondering if like you might be interested in, like him, you know, fighting on that bill, seeing as you had the other man dropping out.”

  John B. finally noticed that Sam wasn’t jumping up and down with enthusiasm. “Well John,” he said in a pointy nasal voice, “as I am sure you are aware, that was not just a regular bout we had to cancel. It was a world-class title fight. It doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint to substitute a fighter like your brother.”

  “Oh,” said John B., squaring off into a boxing stance that didn’t look right on him. “I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried about all that booll-shit they say about brain damage. But it ain’t true. You want the CAT scan? You want a doctor’s report? We can get that to you.”

  “You’re missing the point.” Wolkowitz held up two fingers like goalposts. “Strictly speaking, the decision to give Elijah the fight is not ours to make.”

  “Well then who are we supposed to talk to?” I asked.

  Sam Wolkowitz gave me a look that was supposed to cut me dead. Lips pressed together, eyes turned slightly away. It was a look that must’ve sent people crawling out of the executive suites on their hands and knees. But I’d seen my father stick an ice pick into somebody.