‘Yes, well, again, if you look for the name, you’ll see that it’s not in order.’
‘Of course it is. My father signed it—’
‘I have no doubt of that, sir.’
‘And made it out to me. Look.’
When Spencer jabs his finger at the payee’s name scrawled upon the cheque he realises that he had not looked at it before. In the embarrassment of receiving money from his father, he had checked that the figure and words tallied and then squirrelled it away. Carefully, laboriously, along the dotted line for the payee’s name, his father had made the cheque out to himself, Jimmy Ludwig.
‘But as I say, it’s a very nice watch.’
‘Yes. Thank you. And I—oh. I see. I think I see.’
‘Piaget Polo, circa 1982, I would say.’
‘And how much would you say it’s worth?’
‘That of course is a question of interpretation of the market rather than any intrinsic value, those are the times we live in, I’m sad to say, but I think I can safely offer you two thousand dollars for it.’
‘Oh. Wow. Right. I mean, couldn’t you make it a little more?’
‘Two thousand two hundred.’
‘The cheque’s no good?’
‘The cheque’s no good. Unfortunately.’
‘Two thousand two hundred?’
‘Final offer. It is, I am reluctant to tell you, a buyer’s market here.’
He had thought he would give the watch to Mary when she was eighteen. A father’s gift, a family treasure. ‘Who would you sell it to?’
‘I couldn’t say. It’s a question of luck. Most things are.’
‘You have more sellers than buyers here.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You couldn’t make it two and a half?’
‘Two-two.’
‘Like the ballerina.’
‘Aha. Yes. Very good.’
‘Or the archbishop.’
‘Indeed.’
But the response now is a matter of politeness rather than appreciation or humour. The pawnbroker has given of his time and his care, and all that is left is transaction. He seems like a sensitive man and this is probably no kind of work for a sensitive man. He wipes his glass counter. Beneath it, behind locked security grilles, are the testaments of other people’s misfortunes, gold watches and diamond bracelets and cufflinks and necklaces. There’s one gold chain with the name Debbie hanging down in red jewels or glass.
Two thousand two hundred is less than he needs, but it is a stake. The rule in poker money management is that you should never commit more than five per cent of your bankroll at any one time. But if he takes this money to a cash game he might be able to spin it up into his entry fee to the poker tournament. Spencer used to consider himself a poker player, he could become one again.
‘OK. Let’s do it.’
‘Very good. There’s some paperwork here for us to do and you to sign, merely that you attest that the goods you’ll be pledging are yours to dispose of, and this will be your receipt and if you wish to redeem your property then this attests that you agree to the terms.’
‘Terms?’
‘A sliding scale. Ten per cent interest in the first seven days, a further eight per cent interest after a further fourteen days, five per cent after another thirty days, and so forth.’
‘Is that standard?’
‘Actually quite generous. You could check the terms of our rivals and competitors and colleagues along the Avenue and you would find that we offer comparatively liberal rates. We see it as being in the nature of our business to encourage repeat trade.’
‘That’s fine. I trust you.’
‘Really? That’s heart-warming, if dangerous, but essentially I’m glad.’
EXT. ATLANTIC AVENUE—NIGHT
Sweeping lights, pools of shadow. SPENCER LUDWIG walks briskly, one hand firmly on a rear pocket of his jeans. Cars with tinted windows dawdle past, looking for action or trouble or sin. Women stand on street corners offering their bodies for sale.
HOOKER 1
I give the best BJs in AC.
HOOKER 2
She sure is ugly but she sure is good!
HOOKER 1
You can come on my face if you like.
SPENCER LUDWIG
No. Thank you.
SPENCER LUDWIG walks quickly on.
EXT. PACIFIC AVENUE—NIGHT
SPENCER LUDWIG looks in the window of the Junior Prada shop. His lips move as he scans the clothing on display. He is calculating whether he has enough money to buy everything on display. SPENCER LUDWIG walks on.
INT. HORSESHOE CASINO CARD ROOM
SPENCER LUDWIG sits at the poker table with a look of fierce concentration and a small pile of chips in front of him.
INT. HORSESHOE CASINO CARD ROOM
SPENCER LUDWIG, in exactly same position and with same expression as before, now has a large pile of chips in front of him.
INT. HORSESHOE CASINO CARD ROOM
SPENCER LUDWIG walks to the cashier’s cage.
SPENCER LUDWIG
I’d like to register, for the tournament.
THE CASHIER puts out a hand. SPENCER is about to pass over all his chips. He stops. He squeezes his left wrist with his right hand.
EXT. HORSESHOE CASINO—DAY
SPENCER LUDWIG pushes past a HOTEL CLEANER who is mopping the driveway. SPENCER hails a cab, which swerves to the kerb.
INT. ATLANTIC GOLD PAWNBROKER—DAY
PAWNBROKER
It’s to cover our costs.
SPENCER LUDWIG
What costs? You’ve only had the
watch a few hours.
PAWNBROKER
Terms and conditions, my friend.
I think I apprised you of the sliding scale.
SPENCER LUDWIG passes over a large bundle of banknotes. THE PAWNBROKER waits. SPENCER gets out more money and flicks it under the security glass.
EXT. ATLANTIC AVENUE—DAY
SPENCER LUDWIG walks fast, his left hand firmly in trouser pocket. A glint of gold in the street lights.
INT. HORSESHOE CASINO
Spencer is exhausted. He leans, eyes closed, against the wall of the elevator car. He strokes the face of his father’s watch.
He had felt its absence as a bereavement, the absence of his father’s hand gripping his wrist.
Spencer returns to the room. The maid has been in and restored the room to some shape of order. He opens the safe, puts in his watch, locks the safe—and then unlocks it again, and clasps the watch back to his wrist again, pinching the skin, squeezing hairs around the gold.
It is a relief to be alone. Spencer lies on the bed, flicks through television channels, switches the television off, glances at the room service menu, orders a BLT and a Heineken from a voice that sounds nothing like Dwight’s, switches the television on again, the baffling pointlessness of Hogan’s Heroes, and exhales a long, slow, rumbling breath, which feels like the first time he has properly exhaled since this road trip began.
He wants sex, he wants beer, he wants sleep, he wants food. He is looking forward to his BLT with a hunger that tastes like lust. He loosens his trousers, briefly considers masturbation, but settles instead for a most luxuriant stretch that seems to invite every muscle of his body.
Impatient for his order, he hears a sound in the corridor, hopes it is the waiter, but there is no one there, just a door closing at the far end of the corridor, a woman’s laugh left behind. Returning to the room, he notices first that the backgammon set is not in its proper place on the table by the window, before he sees, rejected on the floor, perhaps kicked half beneath the bed by the foot of a careless or negligent maid, his father’s surgical collar.
Seized by a fluttery panic that he blames his stepmother for—this must be how she feels when anything happens out of her control, an event that she has not sanctioned: the vase in the hallway is an inch away from its regular place, the bread basket in the restaurant does not contain the usual ro
lls, Jacksie’s weekly telephone call is twenty minutes early, the President is caught out in a lie. He resents that he should feel this way too; but his father is not in the bathroom, or in the hall. His father is his responsibility, but Jimmy Ludwig has always been impatient of authority, so perhaps the surprise should be that he had settled, or appeared to, for so long under Spencer’s benevolent rule.
Carrying the grimy surgical collar, Spencer leaves the hotel room. The elevator that takes him downstairs is irksomely slow. He wishes that Dwight were still here because Dwight, in a quietly authoritative manner that Spencer’s stepmother ought to envy, seemed to be in control of most objects and events in his hotel. But Dwight is gone, Dwight is not in the lobby, and neither is Spencer’s father.
He had left him bloodied and sleeping. Anything might have happened to him. He could have died in his sleep, and the supposed order of the room is the flustered result of the hospitality business hiding traces of death. He could be roaming the streets, tottering on the sidewalks, adrift and confused.
Spencer looks for his father in the places that they have been to together. But he is not one of the occupants of the electric wheelchairs in the all-you-can-eat death buffet. He is not on the casino floor at the blackjack table that has been especially widened for the needs of cripples and the dying. He is not sitting outside looking at the Boardwalk or the ocean or the desolate rickshaw riders, shivering in the unseasonal chill. Neither is he gazing in aficionado pleasure at the workings of the vertical blue fountain or sitting in the Sports Book or the crowded festival bar. Spencer goes to the Italian bar, to drink the beer he has missed in the room. He wonders how long he can avoid the possibilities. He might even have to call his stepmother.
And there his father is, in his wheelchair at the table where they had drunk with Drussilla and Tanya. In the absence of the collar, his chin is pressed tight to his chest as he rolls the dice and moves, with wavering hands, his backgammon pieces.
His opponent is a man of indeterminate age, probably closer to Jimmy Ludwig’s age than Spencer’s. He has very grey, papery skin that clings tight to the bones of his face in some places and sags in others. When he removes his baseball cap, deciding what to do with the six and two he has just rolled, he reveals a head that is entirely bald and Spencer wonders whether there is a similar absence of hair everywhere else on his body.
Spencer’s father is dressed in his food-spattered chinos, the yellow polo shirt that must have cost him agonies to force over his head, grey windcheater that once was white. Apart from his uncombed hair, falling away from the scarlet wound on his scalp, he looks unharmed, at ease. Maybe he is imperishable.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ Spencer says.
‘I’m here,’ his father says.
‘This your son? Your dad is a heck of a player.’
‘He has his moments.’
Jimmy Ludwig’s opponent sits with the stoicism and stillness of a professional gambler. Spencer’s anxieties about his missing father are replaced by a fearfulness of the opponent he has chosen to play against or, more likely, who has chosen him, a senescent mark.
Other than a barman who pretends to clean glasses, Spencer’s father and his backgammon partner had the place to themselves before Spencer’s arrival.
The opponent tries to escape one of his pieces from Jimmy Ludwig’s home board. Spencer’s father throws a four and a one, which allows him to hit the piece his opponent had left behind, but not to cover it.
‘Nerves of steel,’ the opponent says. He rolls a double six but the point is occupied and he may not escape the bar.
Spencer hates watching people play backgammon. He only learned the game out of a kind of bored desperation, sitting on his father’s boat, watching his father and stepmother find another way of ignoring him. By the end of the summer, he recognised when his stepmother was making mistakes and, with only days to go before his return to London, he was brave enough to correct her. Magnanimously, she allowed him to take her place at the board, and his father, being a practical man as well as a ruthless one, soon declared his son to be the preferable opponent. Nonetheless, like the sensation of sitting in the back seat of a car, watching backgammon being played arouses in Spencer no sentimentality or calm, just a re-eruption of the resentments and stifled furies of his childhood.
‘What are the stakes?’
‘Two-five,’ the opponent says.
It’s a curious, perhaps local, way of saying twenty-five cents a point, but Spencer is anyway relieved that his father has not opened himself to a fleecing from a rounder. His father always plays for twenty-five cents, and has never changed his mind for anybody, so there is no reason that he will start now.
Jimmy Ludwig offers his opponent a double, which is politely rejected.
‘Ah! No guts,’ Jimmy Ludwig expostulates in disgust and watches his opponent write down the new score on the bar napkin.
‘Dad!’
‘He’s quite a character, your dad. I’m sorry I can’t play much longer.’
Is this the pre-emptive apology for the hit-and-run? Spencer wants to know who’s winning. He can’t see the numbers on the napkin, but, as he would like at least one Ludwig man to represent some kind of courtesy to the world, he just quietly lifts his father’s fallen cane off the ground, hooks it over the basket of his wheelchair, and asks if anyone would like a drink.
No one would, except for him, and he sips his beer and leans back in his chair until his father snaps at him to sit straight, and blames him for the game that he subsequently loses.
Spencer sits sullenly after that, surreptitiously leaning back on the rear legs of his chair. The opponent, whose hairless smoothness is never ruffled by Jimmy Ludwig’s speech-play, the Disgusting!s and Incredible!s and You lucky dog!s, does everything carefully, rolling his dice, moving his pieces, noting down the score. Spencer watches three boards, two of which the opponent wins.
‘OK, I’m going to have to let you go,’ he says.
‘Well it’s been nice, I thank you,’ Jimmy Ludwig says, returned to courtesy again, and Spencer has never realised before quite how calculated are his father’s moods at the table. His father reaches out a hand to shake his opponent’s, apologises for having to go to use the men’s room, and whizzes out of the bar on his electric chair.
‘Looked like quite a game. My father is, you know…’ Spencer says.
‘Please don’t mention it. He’s a very engaging gentleman.’
‘I’m not sure if gentleman is quite the word,’ Spencer says, but seeing an expression of shock slip across the man’s face at a son’s lack of veneration for his elders, he erupts with a little chuckle as if he had been making a joke. A moment of awkward silence is broken by his father’s opponent picking up the scoresheet.
‘OK. I guess it’s time we should settle our accounts. You can act for your father, I suppose?’
‘What was the final score?’
‘He was nineteen points up. It went to and fro, but that was the score at the end of the day.’
‘That makes, what, four seventy-five?’
‘That’s what I make it too. My name is Bob, by the way.’
‘How are you, Bob? I’m Spencer.’
‘Pretty good, pretty good,’ says Bob, reaching into a pocket of his slacks.
Spencer is comfortable in this sort of exchange and he rather likes the seriousness with which Bob is treating the transaction.
‘So,’ Spencer says, ‘if I give you a quarter, then you can give me five.’
‘Sure. That will make it easier.’
Apart from the moment of Spencer’s disrespect for his elders, it has all been very amiable, but the mood is abruptly broken.
‘What the hell is that?!’ Bob wants to know, staring at the offering in Spencer’s hand.
‘A quarter. I thought we said…?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Look, joker boy, it doesn’t pay to make enemies with the likes of me, but here you go, take your fucking money. And I don’t wan
t to see you again, you understand me?’
There is something very chilling in Bob’s face. The hairless man is hard to read, Spencer would not like to encounter him at the poker table, or indeed anywhere, and this does not seem like bluster or a bluff. He fumbles with the wad, replaces some bills with more from another, even larger wad and passes the bundle to Spencer.
‘Look, I’m sorry, I don’t know. I just…’
‘But nothing. Fuck off.’
He suspects the man is insane, but he is gone now, leaving a door swinging behind him, leaving an untaken quarter in Spencer’s right hand and an unlikely roll of bills in his left.
Spencer catches up with his father outside on the Boardwalk. His father is sometimes motivated, at times of triumph or stress, to gaze upon the sea.
‘Uh. Do you know how much you were playing for?’
‘What?’
‘That game. That backgammon game you were just playing.’
‘The guy was called Bob.’
‘Yes. I know. He introduced himself.’
‘A very pleasant fellow.’
‘Well. Be that as it may. What were the stakes?’
‘What?’
‘How much were you playing for? How much a point?’
‘The usual. Why? Didn’t he pay?’
‘He paid. You thought you were playing for twenty-five cents a point?’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Nothing wrong. Oh here. By the way. Here’s your collar. You should be wearing it.’
‘By the way, so where’s my money?’
They are on the ramp that leads from the Boardwalk to the sea. The morning sun is rising, the wind is blowing, and the wad of Spencer’s father’s money is making a priapic bulge in Spencer’s right trouser pocket.
‘Your…?’
‘You heard.’
Spencer’s father’s hair rises and falls in the breeze. Spencer pats and finger-combs it back into place, smoothing the strands over the eggshell scalp, bare except for the wounds that Spencer had inflicted in the night; and Spencer’s father tilts his head, relaxing into the contact. Ignobly, Spencer feels as if he has won a victory here, although he is not sure who is his defeated opponent.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 16