Florida Straits

by SKLA

  "Who's a Fed?"

  "What's 'er name? Lucy."

  "Joey, she's a mailman."

  "A Fed's a Fed. You think they don't all work together? They all wanna know your business. Right away it's the IRS, the FBI."

  "Joey, admit it. You're just uptight about the naked part."

  He languidly dug a toe into the compound's white gravel. "Awright, I admit it. I didn't bring you down here to hang around a bunch of guys with their dicks out. Am I weird? No, I'm not weird. Sandra, this is a weird town."

  "You're the one who wanted to come here," she said. "I was perfectly happy to stay in Queens. Say what you want about Queens, Joey, at least people don't go around with nothing on."

  Joey raised his hands up around his temples. It was a gesture of surrender but also a warning that he didn't want to hear any more. "So, Sandra, you're telling me you wanna live in this freakin' nudist camp?"

  "I'm telling you we haven't seen anything better we can afford. I'm telling you I don't wanna go back to some depressing motel that stinks of mildew. And I'm telling you that if we don't make a decision, I'm gonna scream."

  Joey tapped his foot; the gravel dust did not come off his black loafer. Then he walked back to the pool.

  "So, Steve," he said. "We're innerested. But eighteen hundred—it's a little steep for us. Take fifteen."

  Steve looked at the broker. The broker looked at Steve.

  "Fifteen if it's year-round," said the naked landlord. "If you'll sign a full-year lease."

  "Deal," said Joey. He felt like he'd gotten away with something, and it cheered him up. Three hundred bucks off just for signing a stupid piece of paper.

  "I'll get the lease," Steve said, but Joey stopped him with a gesture before he could wade to the stairs. Underwater was bad enough. He wasn't ready for full frontal in the glaring light of day.

  "We'll go get our car and stuff," said Joey. "We'll sign the papers after."

  — 5 —

  On a breezy morning at the end of January, Joey Goldman stood in front of his bathroom mirror and tried to figure out how best to display his sunglasses on those rare occasions when he wasn't actually wearing them. Some guys, he'd noticed, hooked them around their second shirt button, and let them hang straight down. This was stylish, Joey thought, but maybe, well, a little feminine. Of course, he could simply drop them in his breast pocket, but then they were invisible, he got no benefit at all. Maybe the suave compromise was to put them in the pocket, but with an earpiece looped outside.

  Joey spent about ten minutes on this problem, and told himself he wasn't killing time, he was working on his image, which after all was an important aspect of his business. He wasn't hiding out inside the compound, inside the cottage, behind the bathroom door. Or maybe he was. Had he ever in his life had a more frustrating few weeks? He couldn't say for sure.

  He hadn't made a nickel, and it was a damn good thing Sandra had right away found a job. Seems there was a shortage of bank tellers in south Florida, and considering what they were paid, that was not surprising. Her salary at Keys Marine was just enough to halve the pace at which they were going broke.

  Meanwhile Joey had a lot of time to himself, to think, to organize, to set things up. But all he'd really accomplished was laying down the base coat for a glorious tan. That, and meeting the neighbors.

  The neighbors were very Key West, and Joey, who was not, had a tough time figuring out how he was supposed to feel about them. Take Peter and Claude. They couldn't have been nicer or more welcoming, but they were, after all, queer. Claude was blond, very tall and thin, and walked like he was modeling mink coats. Peter had bleached his hair but kept his eyebrows dark, as if trying unsuccessfully to look sinister. They worked late, and would emerge from their cottage around two P.M., wearing sarongs. They'd offer Joey herb tea and cookies that didn't snap, they bent: Key West was a humid place. Then they'd ask him questions about the theater, the opera, downtown clubs, stuff like that. Questions about New York, but not the New York Joey knew. Joey couldn't deny that he appreciated the company, the chitchat, but he also couldn't deny that there was something faggoty about herb tea, about a drink where you could see the bottom of the cup. He couldn't tell if he was pretending to like Peter and Claude but didn't, or pretending not to but did.

  With Wendy and Marsha, it was the opposite. They were cordial enough, but Joey had the distinct impression they didn't like him. They made him feel like he was intruding from a distance. They had a cat they took for walks, and they held each other's arms while they walked it. They always seemed to be deep in conversation on deep subjects—art, politics, whatever. Wendy, or maybe it was Marsha, had the hairiest legs Joey had ever seen, legs with ringlets. His eyes were drawn to them as to the stump of a missing arm, and this made conversation awkward.

  With Luke the reggae musician, conversation was awkward for a different reason. Luke didn't talk. He lived with a Walkman clipped onto the waistband of his shorts, and would sometimes sit for hours with his feet dangling in the pool and his eyes narrowed in concentration. When Lucy the mailman came home from work, she'd plop down next to him on the cool tiles, still wearing her post office shorts, slate blue with a navy stripe at the side. Lucy was extremely beautiful, for a Fed, with huge dark eyes widely spaced and skin as even and inviting as the morning's first cup of creamy coffee. But even this caused Joey some unease because he hadn't been raised to find black women, or letter carriers, attractive.

  So the compound, all in all, was diverting, a relatively inexpensive form of foreign travel. But Joey hadn't come to Florida in search of the exotic, he'd come to make his fortune, and the fact was that three weeks into his new life, he was no closer to a payday than on the morning he'd bolted Queens. Not that he'd been lazy. No. Especially in the first ten days, two weeks, he'd been enterprising as hell. He'd really put himself out there. But nothing had worked. He'd been laughed at, kissed off, insulted, threatened, and if he hadn't caught a beating, that was only because of his well-developed feel for the moment when he should back off and scram.

  First, there was the disaster of the numbers game, what the Cubans call bolita. It was a nice little operation, pegged to the track at Hialeah but locally run, and Joey didn't see why he shouldn't have a piece of it. He wasn't looking to muscle in, and he wasn't looking for a handout. He wanted a partnership, and he'd give value for his cut. Numbers was something he knew; he knew it big-city style. So he'd bring some sophistication to the racket, expand it up the Keys. It would be good for everybody. More cash flow for the Cubans, and for Joey a natural recruiting pool for some solid soldiers.

  So he went to a cafe on Virginia Street, sat down at the counter near a fan whose grille was matted with streamers of greasy dust, and ordered up a Cuban sandwich. He watched the patron slap it together; it wasn't pretty. Fatty pork. Some kind of gray lunch meat with big globs of lard stuck in it. Limp onions sodden with oil. Thick smears of warm, off-color mayonnaise on both sides of the spongy bread. Joey started feeling queasy before he'd had a bite. From his Sicilian father he'd inherited a certain finickiness about all foods not invented, cooked, and served by Italians; from his Jewish mother he'd acquired the phobic belief that anything not kept tightly wrapped in the refrigerator, then overcooked would instantly turn to poison. But Joey had a job to do. He started the sandwich.

  "I wanna buy some bolita numbers," he said softly to the patron.

  The man was overweight, unshaven, his teeth looked soft, and one of his shirttails was hanging out. But stupid he was not. He looked at the gringo suffering through his lunch. The gringo wore a stiff white shirt like no one wore in Key West, except maybe to a wedding, and he carried his sunglasses like a cop who was toying not to look like one. "We no sell numbers here."

  Joey gave him a knowing wink. "Come on. This is my neighborhood now. I'm right around the corner. You're telling me I gotta go all the way to where I useta live to buy my numbers?"

  "Where you use to live, my friend?"

  Joey
stifled a belch. "Bertha Street." That was near where Sandra worked.

  "Ees not so far, my friend. You like the bolita, you buy your numbers there."

  A week and four nauseating lunches later, Joey had acquired enough credibility to be allowed to buy some losing numbers, and to meet the bolita runner for Virginia Street. His name was Hector. Hector was sixteen, didn't walk right, was cross-eyed behind thick glasses, and went to Catholic school. Joey decided he wouldn't recruit him as one of his boys, just use him for one little errand.

  "Hector," he said, "hold out your hands. Here's twenty dollars. That's for you. Here's a hundred dollars. That's for your boss. Give it to him and tell him to arrange a meeting between me and his boss. Tell him a gentleman with friends in New York would like to discuss some business with him. You got that, Hector?"

  Next day, Hector told him that Senor Carlos would see him at four o'clock at a laundromat on White Street. This allowed Joey to get up from the lunch counter without having to finish his glistening pile of greasy fried bananas.

  —

  He pulled up in the Eldorado and saw three men sitting on mesh beach chairs under an awning, playing dominoes on a cardboard box. "I'm looking for Carlos."

  The men stood up, and the one in the middle, who was a head shorter and fifty pounds lighter than either of the other two, said, "I'm Carlos." He was clean-shaven and very wiry, with black hair swept straight back. He'd been born in Florida, went to college for a year, and had no accent except when he wanted one. He wore frameless glasses that gave him the nervously studious look of an early Bolshevik. "Nice car." He lifted his chin toward the smashed windshield.

  "Coconut," said Joey.

  "Happens a lot down here," said Carlos. "Makes you look like a local."

  Joey was duly flattered. Newcomers to Key West always liked to be taken for locals. This changed after they'd met a few.

  "Come on," said Carlos, "we'll talk in the back."

  He led the way through the laundromat. It was full of old Cuban ladies in black dresses and had the yeasty smell of warm lint. A girl in tight jeans seemed to be having a nervous breakdown on the pay phone. Carlos's men filed behind Joey, giving him the uneasy feeling that someone was about to step on his heel. He felt his shoulders hunching up as if in preparation for the blow.

  At the back of the laundromat, a vacant doorframe gave onto a garden. A big four-sided picnic table had been built around a lime tree, and on this table was a basket, a basket big as a tire, filled with unidentifiable fruits. Carlos motioned Joey into a chair, and he himself sat on a picnic bench. His two huge and hairy men perched on the table on either side of the gigantic fruit bowl; the effect was of a still life by a painter who had lost his mind.

  "So, Mr. . . ."

  "Goldman. Joey Goldman."

  "Yes. Mr. Goldman. What can I do for you?"

  "I admire your operation," Joey said.

  Carlos looked utterly bored by the compliment and made no answer. One of his men picked up a fruit that resembled Sputnik and started peeling it with a knife considerably larger than was strictly necessary for the job.

  "I'd like to work with you," Joey continued.

  Carlos frowned. "You Jewish?"

  "Half. You got a problem with that?" Vague memories of disastrous Yom Kippur fistfights cropped up not in Joey's mind but in his stomach.

  "Me?" said Carlos. "Not at all. You know what the Puerto Ricans call the Cubans? Los judiós del Caribe. They call us that because they're jealous. Because we work hard. We know how to do business. Whadda they know how to do? Cook beans and talk about pussy. Me, I have no problem with Jews. I just like to know who I'm dealing with."

  "I'm also half Sicilian," Joey said.

  "Ah," said Carlos. He balanced his chin on his knuckles; the pose made him look more than ever like an earnest, aging student. "Half Sicilian. Friends in New York. Cadillac. Goes around flashing hundred- dollar bills. So what are you trying to tell me, Mr. Goldman? Are you telling me things are so bad up north that the Mafia has to send a guy all the way down here to fuck with my little bolita game?"

  Carlos's goon had finished peeling his fruit and was sucking out the flesh. It had slimy seeds in it, and the goon started spitting them out closer to Joey's black loafers than seemed respectful.

  "Did I say anybody sent me?" Joey said. "All I said is I got friends up there."

  "Well, good for you," said Carlos, and without raising his voice a single decibel he managed a crescendo of irritation. "I got friends too. I got friends in Miami and I got friends in Havana and I got friends in city hall. And in case you haven't looked at a road map lately, those places are all a lot closer to where you're sitting than fucking New York is."

  The spray of slimy seeds came closer to Joey's feet, so close that he couldn't help examining them. They consisted of tiny black pits surrounded by globes of yellowish ooze. He slid his shoes back a couple of inches and didn't realize until later that by that small retreat he had in effect surrendered.

  "Carlos, I been looking at road maps plenty. But listen, I'm coming to you like a gentleman, to see if we can work together. You got no reason to get mad."

  "That's where you're wrong. I do have a reason. You cost me a hundred twenty dollars already. Fredo, give the man his hundred twenty dollars."

  The goon who was not sucking fruit lumbered down from the picnic table and approached Joey. He reached deep into his pants pocket, seemed to be scratching his gonads, then produced a pair of bills.

  Joey waved them away. "Hey look, I don't want that money back. That was an investment."

  "You don't understand," said Carlos. He shook his head sadly at the ignorance of outsiders. "It's a cultural thing. You don't give my people money. To give people money, that's an honor. You haven't earned that honor, Mr. Goldman. I give them money. And I never take anything away from my people. Never. So you know what that means? It means that money you spread around so you could look like a big shot, with your fucking Cadillac, your New York plates, that was my money. And now I got a reason to be mad at you."

  "Carlos, listen ..."

  "Fredo, give 'im the fucking money."

  The goon approached, a hideous, blubbery smile on his face. He reached out his fat fingers and put the bills in Joey's shirt pocket, the same pocket as his sunglasses. The gesture was actually rather gentle, yet it felt to Joey that talons had snapped out and were clawing at his heart.

  "There," said Carlos. "That's what you've cost me, just by coming down here. So do yourself a favor and don't ever cost me one more dollar. You got that, Mr. Goldman?"

  — 6 —

  Joey had not been able to remember the retreat through the laundromat. The first thing he recalled was standing on the sidewalk, watching the low red sunlight bounce off his smashed windshield and throw rainbows onto the Caddy's old upholstery. He reached for his sunglasses, and when he pulled them out of his shirt pocket, the hundred and twenty dollars fell onto the street. He hesitated a moment, thinking that it would be a suave gesture to let the money lie there. Then he bent down and plucked the bills off the hot asphalt, hoping no one would notice.

  Back at the compound, he'd made a rum and tonic, sat down with it near the pool, and noted in himself a dangerous desire. It was the desire just to sit there and do nothing. When things went badly, it made sitting near water with a cocktail seem absolutely heavenly, saner than any possible action. Then, too, there was the tropical thing. Up north people kept busy to keep warm, kept moving so as not to get trampled. Here it was pleasantest to stay still. This was not something you decided but something you realized through your pores. The air was the same temperature as your skin. It felt good. Soft breezes whispered of the timeless appeal of being a lazy bum.

  The only problem was the money.

  That, and the way Sandra looked when she got home from work—pale, dressed in long-sleeved business blouses that were too warm, her light eyes tired behind the big square glasses, her fingertips gray- green from counting out fresh
twenties. He'd greet her, tan, in a bathing suit, and after hello there'd be a pregnant silence. Problem was, anything Sandra said—What's new? How was your day?—sounded to Joey like a reproach. Not that Sandra meant it that way. She'd sit down on the edge of Joey's lounge chair and pull her skirt primly over her knees. She'd take deep breaths of the jasmine and frangipani, getting the stale aftertaste of air-conditioning out of her lungs, and she'd try to make civil conversation. Joey, like a sulky teenager whose true frustration is that he has nothing to hide, would seem to be hiding behind one-word answers. His day was fine. Nothing was new.

  The thing was, Joey would have liked to talk to her, but where he was from, there were a lot of things you just didn't discuss with your girlfriend. What's new? Well, I tried to take over the numbers racket today. How was your day? Lousy—a three-hundred-pound Cuban spit fruit on my shoe. No, this was not stuff you told your girlfriend, only your pals. But that assumed you had pals, and who were Joey's buddy-boys down here? Peter and Claude? So Joey mostly kept mum. As soon as he could, he moved the conversation away from himself.

  "Sandra," he'd say, "those clothes, they're too hot. You must be like sweltering. Why don't you buy your-self some new ones?"

  By reflex, Sandra would run her hand along the fabric of her skirt. "This is O.K. for now. After I get a few paychecks, maybe I'll go shopping."

  "And then we gotta get you tan."

  Sandra gave a little laugh. "Never happen." Then she looked down at the still blue water of the swimming pool, looked at it as if it were a thousand miles away instead of at her feet. "I wouldn't mind some time to lay around, though."

  There it was, thought Joey. Not an accusation, not even a complaint. Just the truth. Joey was not holding up his end, and he knew it.

  So, a couple of evenings after his meeting with Carlos, he went downtown to look into the pimping business.

  He wasn't going to be a pimp. He had standards about that kind of thing—though it was true that, under the pressures of idleness and exile, he could already feel his standards beginning to erode. Still, pimps (by which Joey meant New York pimps) were an unseemly and amateurish lot. They took drugs and wore idiotic hats, they squandered assets and drowned themselves in after-shave, their business acumen was in their dicks and they had no feel for detail work. They badly needed organization, and that's where Joey would come in—as a sort of pimp's pimp, to discipline them like they disciplined the women. It could be a good thing for everybody, Joey thought. Territory could be fairly assigned. Arguments and slashings could be kept to a minimum. Everyone would earn more and the public would be guaranteed a quality product.