Florida Straits

by SKLA

  Then, too, as jobs went, what Sandra was suggesting didn't really sound so awful. OPC, it was called— Off-Property Contact. What it meant was that he would hang out on a corner of Duval Street, button-hole tourists as they drifted past, and try to persuade them to take a tour of a time-share resort. If they took the tour, Joey got forty bucks a couple, and that was the end of it. Didn't matter if they bought, didn't matter if they'd never buy in a million years. His job was only to talk them past the door. The fellow who had the job now was this guy named Zack, the husband of Claire, who was one of Sandra's fellow tellers, and supposedly he was pulling in eight hundred bucks a week. A real go-getter, this Zack. He'd just passed his real estate test and was ready to move inside, to sell. No doubt Sandra, whose circuits were wired between the opposing poles of practicality and dreaming, imagined that Joey would get on that same track.

  "Joey, you'd be great at it," she coaxed. "It's exactly what you like to do. Don't be pigheaded just because it happens to be legal. It's a hustle."

  Joey wavered. The last thing he had in mind was an ongoing entanglement with the world of pay stubs and file cabinets, sales meetings and company picnics. But as a temporary thing, very temporary, well, maybe he could salt away a few dollars while planning his next moves. "I don't know, Sandra, standing there all day, having to be nice to these jerks—"

  Sandra played her trump card. "Who says you have to be nice? That isn't how this guy Zack makes his eight hundred a week. He browbeats. He needles. Joey, the idea isn't to be nice, the idea is to capture these people. You use anything that works. Guilt. Jokes. Fibs. Crazy promises. It's a con, Joey. It's a game."

  "And it's legal?"

  "And it's legal. It's real estate. Joey, think of it as a legal way of taking hostages."

  —

  Across the street from the Eclipse Saloon was a bank, and in front of the bank was a sign that blinked out the time and the temperature. Other places, those thermometer signs tended to exert the morbid fascination of an accident scene: How bad was it? you asked yourself as you drove by. Would it hit one hundred in July? In January, would the frigid numbers skid through zero into the awful minus? In Key West it was different. There was something smug about the temperature sign. It made you feel like knocking wood, as if you'd caught yourself gloating about your own good fortune. In the daytime the sign always seemed to read eighty-two degrees, though on occasion the mercury would plummet to seventy-eight or a heat wave would raise it to a steamy eighty-four. When the sun went down, the temperature went down with it, and just as gently. By full darkness the reading had settled into the middle seventies, and there it stayed until after mid-night. By dawn it was just cool enough so that, many mornings, you woke up with a dim but pleasurable recollection of having groped for a cool sheet to pull under your chin.

  When Sandra and Joey emerged onto the sidewalk, the sign said seventy-six degrees and a moon just shy of full was throwing a cool white light that broke into red and blue fragments in the smashed glass of the Eldorado's windshield.

  "Beautiful out," said Sandra.

  "Drive to the beach?" said Joey.

  The Caddy's top had not been up in weeks, and the open car held the smell of sunshine and limestone dust. Through what was left of the muffler, baritone pops issued forth, steady as the beating of a drum. Joey slipped through the narrow residential streets and onto A1A, the fabled road that traces out the very rim of Florida, separating land from water with a line hardly more substantial than a layer of skin. He drove past the Paradiso condominium, almost to the airport, then pulled off the pavement on the ocean side and pointed the car toward Cuba.

  Sandra slid closer and put her hand on Joey's knee. The feel of it made him realize that they hadn't touched much lately. "It's been tough for you, huh?" he said. "With the move and me not earning and all?"

  "A little. I'm O.K."

  For a while they sat in silence. Traffic zipped by behind them, and ahead moonlight played on the shallow water, tracing a rippled white line from the horizon to the seawall in front of them.

  "You know what I love about moonlight on water?" Sandra said. "No matter where you are, it points right to you, like the moon knows you're watching and is picking you out for something, something special."

  'Yeah, but it points to everybody," Joey said.

  "O.K., O.K., but I don't have to think about that. I just see it pointing to us. Look. Right at us."

  Joey put his arm around her. Sandra usually wore clothes that puffed her up—fuzzy sweaters with big outlines, blouses with built-in shoulders—and after almost four years, Joey was still sometimes surprised to feel her narrow bones and thin skin in his hands. He squeezed the small knob at the top of her arm, rubbed the spare flesh between shoulder and elbow. "Sandra," he said softly, "what if I just can't do it?"

  "Do what?"

  "This job." He took his arm away, put both hands on the steering wheel, and looked absently at his zeroed-out speedometer. "I mean, Sandra, I think I'm pretty bright. I got confidence. But I also got this lousy feeling, it makes me mad, like there's all kindsa things that everybody else knows and I don't. Dumb stuff. Filling out forms. What ya say onna telephone. When ya use a paper clip and when ya use a staple. I mean, these stupid little things that people know if they have a job. Me, I've never done that. To me it's like a big mystery."

  "You're a little scared, Joey. That's O.K."

  The word was like a lance, and after the flash of pain and the squelched rage of denying it was so, there was relief. Joey stared out across the flat and moon-shot water of the Florida Straits and let out a long breath that whistled slightly between his teeth.

  "You can do it, Joey," Sandra said. "I know you can. Things are gonna get better for us."

  — 12 —

  Zack Davidson was thirty-two, had sandy-brown hair, hazel eyes widely spaced, horn-rim glasses held on with an elegant elastic cord, and Joey Goldman hated him on sight. He hated the way his hair fell onto his forehead in a seemingly casual yet perfect arc, like a spent wave crawling up a beach. He hated the confident pinkness of his knit shirt, the perfect way the ribbed cuff neither hung loose nor pinched his arm. He hated the cheap but perfect cotton belt holding up his khaki shorts, and the conceited inexpensiveness of his Timex watch. Everything about him said yacht club, golf course, prep school, WASP, and gave Joey a feeling in his gut as if a hot fist were yanking at the inside of his navel. It didn't help at all that Zack had right away gone into the question of Joey's sunglasses.

  "Eye contact is real important," he was saying.

  "Tough shit," said Joey. "The glasses stay."

  He said it as if throwing a punch, and like a punch, the remark caused the receiving party to pause and reconsider who he was dealing with. Zack put down the pencil he'd been twirling and stared at Joey across the narrow desk. They were sitting in the downtown office of Parrot Beach Interval Ownership Associates, next to a scale model of the development. Immaculate under Plexiglas, the model featured pastel duplexes with dainty shutters, feathery plastic palms, Barbiesque figures on tiny lounge chairs around a pool whose water was made of blue Saran Wrap. A toy boat was pulled up on a real sand beach.

  "Joey," Zack said at last, "you got a lousy fucking attitude. I like that in a person. Shows spirit. But you have to make it work for you, not against you. I can train you or I can train the next hard-on down the line. So you want this fucking job, or what?"

  Now it was Joey's turn to ponder. He hadn't expected to hear such blithe obscenities from Zack Davidson's well-formed lips. Then again, all of this was new to him, he had no idea what to expect. Stalling for time, he studied the miniature development, the tiny hedges, the teensy people. He found it spooky. Life sometimes seemed small enough without suggesting that you could boil it down, stick it under glass, and take the whole thing in in a single look.

  "Yeah," said Joey, "I want the job, but I ain't gonna let the job make me crazy."

  "Good answer," said Zack. "So what you do, you put you
r craziness into the job. You see what I'm saying?"

  Joey didn't.

  "Best OPC we ever had," Zack continued, "was a total lunatic. His name was Whistling Freddie. Failed comedian. He'd stand on the corner on a washtub, whistling Mozart. When people stopped to listen, he'd start talking at them like the guy in the Fed Ex commercials. Then he'd go into impersonations, foreign accents, dick jokes. By the time ne got around to selling the tour, people were helpless. People can't say no when they're laughing. Remember when you were a kid, somebody tickled you and it took all your strength away? Same thing. And you know where Whistling Freddie is now? In the Virgin Islands, on top of a hill, on three acres of his very own."

  Zack ended with an emphatic nod, and it very faintly dawned on Joey that he had no idea if he should believe a single word. It was all so neat with Zack. You cursed, he cursed; suddenly you're on the same side. You mention craziness, he jumps in and makes it sound like craziness makes you rich. What if it was all bullshit? Then again, what if it wasn't? What if having a straight job meant that you unleashed your rotten attitude, gave vent to your personality defects, made an ass of yourself in public, and the upshot of all this legitimate embarrassment was that you ended up a substantial property owner with money in the bank?

  "Look," Zack resumed, "this business is about one thing and one thing only. Human nature. It's all a question of reading people. Who's our best prospective customer? We have two. A dumb guy who thinks he's smart, and a cheapskate who thinks he's a sport. Why? Because the dumb guy who thinks he's smart figures, Hey, why should I spend a hundred fifty bucks a night in a hotel when I can spend thirty thousand on a time-share and save money? The cheap-skate who thinks he's a sport, he wants to let people know he's a player, he's in the market to buy, but the thought of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house makes his bowels loosen. So O.K., how do we recognize these people?"

  Joey just sat. He knew how to recognize a debtor who couldn't meet his vig payments, he knew how to recognize a contractor eager to kiss up to a union. He didn't know how to recognize a likely hostage for a time-share tour.

  Zack bounced the eraser end of his pencil against his clipboard. "I'll give it to you in two dirty words," he said. "Social class. What kind of tourist we get down here, Joey? On the one hand, we get a lot of southern, blue-collar, white-trash, flag-waving, Bible- thumping, football-crazy, redneck slobs. No value judgment implied. They drive down in the ol' RV and park near a pier so they don't have to walk too far to sit on a milk crate and go fishing all day. When you see 'em downtown, they always have a lot of writing on their clothes and there's usually something weird about their socks. These are not our people, Joey. This isn't snobbery, you understand. It's just that we want our owners to be happy, and folks like this are never truly content unless they're in a truck.

  "At the other extreme," Zack continued, "we get a few very rich people down here. New Yorkers. Bostonians. People who own large pieces of downtown Toronto. They've already done St. Barth's, Mustique bores them, now they're slumming closer to home. They wear pastels. They weigh, on average, sixty pounds less than the poor people. The women are flat-chested, the men have no behinds, but they look good in their clothes. These are not our customers either. The rich are squeamish about time-sharing. It nauseates them to think, the week before, someone with less money was sitting on their toilet.

  "No," said Zack, standing up next to the Parrot Beach model and gazing down like a god at a fresh- imagined world, "our buyer is somewhere in between. We want the guy who's like fifty-five, on his second or third wife. He's a dry cleaner, a sales manager, he's making like sixty, seventy grand, and he thinks he's upper crust because he has expensive golf clubs and a Ralph Lauren shirt. He acts like he doesn't give a shit about the gifts you get for taking the tour, but if you look closely, you can see him toting it up: meal voucher, forty dollars; passes to the Treasure Museum—"

  "Treasure Museum?" Joey cut in.

  "Yeah, the Clem Sanders Treasure Museum. Clem's a salvor. Fucking rich by now—he's one of the partners in the property. Anyway, the passes are worth twelve bucks, so that makes fifty-two. Tour takes two hours, that works out to twenty-six bucks an hour: Is my time worth more or less than twenty-six bucks an hour? That's our boy, Joey. He's got some money in the bank, he'll go the extra twenty dollars a week to rent a T-Bird instead of a compact, but he can't stop wondering if his life is worth twenty-six bucks an hour. You get it?"

  Joey sat there. He was dazed. He wasn't sure if he got it or not. It seemed to him that only when he entered the Parrot Beach office had he truly left Queens. Before that, he was carrying his neighborhood around with him, as if he had taken the little stash of things he knew about and packed it in the car along with his black loafers and alpaca cardigans. Now all of a sudden he'd been plunked down in a vast new borough, the neighborhood of American salesmanship. It was a different place.

  "So you gonna, like, try me out?" The question was a little weak, almost as if Joey was hoping Zack would say no.

  "No tryout, Joey. You want the job, you got the job. Around here it's sink or swim. You fuck up, we won't have to fire you. You'll make no money, feel like a horse's ass, get disgusted with the whole thing, and stop showing up. Here." Zack bent down, opened a desk drawer, and threw a pink shirt at Joey. "This is what you wear."

  He caught the shirt by reflex, but then looked down at it as though it were a thing unclean. It was the color of cotton candy and had the same ribbed cuffs that looked so annoyingly perfect on Zack Davidson's well-tanned and lightly freckled arms. "Shit," he said, "I gotta dress up like some wimpy-looking prissy-ass WASP?" Then it occurred to him that maybe he'd gotten a little too personal. "No offense."

  "What offense?" said Zack, resuming his chair and leaning it back on its hind legs. "You think I'm a WASP? That's a crack-up. I'm a Jew, man, Litvak trash from Newark, New Jersey, the lowest of the low. They fucked our name up at Ellis Island. Should've been Davidovich, something like that. But Joey, remember. Social class. Appearances. Reading people. Study up, my friend. It's gonna be the key to your success in this business."

  — 13 —

  Getting Sal Giordano on the telephone was not a simple process. He was paranoid about wiretaps and refused to have a phone at his apartment. You could leave a coded message for him at Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard, and if you got lucky he might even be there when you called. But he wouldn't actually talk on the old rotary pay phone in the green- painted alcove at the end of Perretti's counter, because that phone could be tapped as well. The most Sal would do was say hello, give a few one-word answers, and arrange a conversation on a different phone. To be safe, however, this other phone had to be away from the immediate neighborhood and couldn't be used too often. This meant there had to be several choices. So Sal had to figure out which phone he wanted to use that day, how long it would take him to reach it, given traffic and weather, and then hope the box hadn't been vandalized by the time he got there. Crime paid, but convenient it was not.

  On an afternoon toward the middle of February, after trying morning and evening, from home and from downtown, for several days, Joey finally managed to connect with his old friend. "Sal!"

  "Joey!" said the gruff, familiar voice. "Where are you, man?"

  "Key West, like I said I would be." For Sal, the question had been first and foremost a part of his routine security check on telephones, and so the next and more radical part of Joey's answer did not immediately sink in. "In a deli next to where I work. Where're you?"

  "Me?" Sal said. "Inna parking lot of the Airline Diner, out near La Guardia. 'Scuse me if I gotta yell. Lotta fuckin' planes going by. Hey, wait a second. Did you say where you work?"

  "You picked up on that, huh?" said Joey. "Unbefuckinglievable, huh? Yeah, I got a job."

  "Doing what?" Sal yelled, above the whine of a landing jet.

  "Real estate. Sort of. I stand onna corner and con people into going to look at these condos. Time-snare, they call it. Start
ing to make a little bit of money."

  "Joey, that's great," Sal said, and though he meant it, he could not keep out of his voice some of the same doubt and sourness that had crept in when his younger pal had first said he was heading south. It had to do with watching someone you care about go someplace you know that you will never follow. "So you haven't taken over the rackets yet?"

  Joey laughed into the phone. "Hey, I tried. Fact, I got some stories, Sal, you'll shit. Probably I'll try again sometime. But ya know, what I was tryin' to do, it was too much too soon. The rules down here, the traditions, everything's different. Up north the money comes outta the street, down here it comes outta the water."

  "Fuck does that mean?" shouted Sal Giordano.

  "That's what I gotta figure out before I try again," said Joey. "And inna meantime I'm hooking tourists for forty bucks a couple. How are things up there?"

  Sal hesitated as a plane screamed past. "Up here it's like eighteen degrees, old ladies are falling down onnee ice, and I'm freezing my nuts off."

  "I'm not asking for the weather report, Sal. How're things?"

  Sal hesitated again, though this time there was no airplane. "Not great, Joey. It's a very tense time up here. Very tense."

  "The cops?"

  "Nah, not the cops. Cops are pretty much leaving us alone. It's among our own people. There's a lotta mistrust, lotta bad feeling. Some guys have been disappearing. People are talking like maybe there's gonna be war."

  " 'Zis about Charlie Ponte's emeralds?"

  "Fuck you know about that?" Sal asked, and even though he was talking to his adopted kid brother, the former runt who never won a fight and was never entrusted with any but the dullest and most trivial errands, such was the mood of wariness among members of the Queens and Brooklyn Mafia families that he could not quite squelch a note of suspicion. "You know more than you did when you was up here."

  "I got a friend down here," Joey said. It sounded like, and was, a boast. "You remember a guy named Bert the Shirt?"