The 25th Hour

by David Benioff

  Jakob stabs a mustard green with one chopstick. ‘So what are the criteria?’

  ‘You want some dumpling? . . . Okay, first off, money. You make none. That right there keeps you out of the top ten percent.’

  ‘Ten percent of what? Ten percent of the gold diggers.’

  ‘Ten percent, period. Two, you’re short. No offense, but a lot of women won’t go out with anybody shorter than them. Why are you getting so mad? It’s a fact. What are you, five-six?’

  ‘I’m five-eight.’

  ‘You are not five-eight.’

  Jakob uses his chopstick as a catapult to hurl a mustard green at Slattery’s face; Slattery grabs the leaf in midair and stuffs it in his mouth.

  ‘Fuck you,’ says Jakob, but it doesn’t sound right. There is a hesitancy in Jakob’s cursing, a hitch before his fucks and shits; the words come across as self-consciously selected. The speech of Monty and Slattery is rife with profanity, but for them it sounds entirely natural.

  Slattery shrugs. ‘It’s just facts, man. Don’t let it get you down.’

  But Jakob is down. In high school he convinced himself that he was a late bloomer, the Pimpled Virgin, a type played in movies by funny-looking kids with braces who trip through the first reel, bullied and insulted, but lose their V to beauties before the credits roll. Jakob feels he has the right to that ending; he has been waiting patiently for ten years. Not that he’s a virgin – Jakob has slept with three separate women, all of them kind and vaguely attractive – but three? Twenty-six years old and only three women? He knows he shouldn’t think of it statistically; he is not chasing Hank Aaron’s home-run record. But it’s hard when your best friends are getting laid sophomore year of high school and you’re watching the nude talk show on channel J; it’s hard teaching The Great Gatsby and talking about Daisy and realizing that your teenage students get more action than you do; it’s hard still playing the Pimpled Virgin at age twenty-six, minus the pimples, minus the virginity.

  For the past three weeks, the nightly jerk-off has starred Mary D’Annunzio, which makes Jakob feel sick at heart. I’m not a pervert, he tells himself, but he has a hard time believing it. She’s too young, he knows she’s too young, he knows he will not lay hands on her, but Christ, she’s a squatter in his skull. If I wait three years? he thinks. I could wait that long. Travel up to whatever college she’s at, find her name in the student directory. And then . . . what? Would I just call her? What would I say?

  Hi, Mary? Mary D’Annunzio? This is – do you recognize my voice? No? It’s Mr Elinsky! From Campbell-Sawyer.

  Oh, Jesus, thinks Jakob, that’s pathetic. I’d have to find out where she was living and then, somehow or other, arrange to bump into her.

  Mary? Mary D’Annunzio? My God, what are you doing here? You go here, that’s right, I completely . . . Oh, I’m just visiting some friends. What a nice surprise, running into you . . . Excuse me? . . . Of course, you can tell me anything you’d like . . . No, tell me, tell me. I’m good at keeping secrets . . . You had a huge crush on me? Really? . . . No, no, don’t be embarrassed, it’s . . . well, I don’t know if lots of girls did. Maybe a couple.

  ‘What are you grinning about?’ asks Slattery.

  ‘What puts you in the ninety-ninth percentile? That’s what I’m wondering.’

  ‘Okay, I’m—;’

  ‘Aside from your salary.’

  Slattery hesitates. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Doesn’t losing your hair drop you down a few places?’

  ‘Nope, not at all. It would only bother women if it bothered me.’

  ‘It does bother you,’ says Jakob.

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘Of course it does. If it didn’t bother you, you wouldn’t smear that goop all over your scalp twice a day.’

  Jakob knows it’s dangerous to push the point when Slattery starts looking at you like that, looking at you like you’re a small bug crawling across the television screen, but Jakob also knows he can get away with it. Slattery will never smack him. Still, Jakob remembers the time Slattery lost a wrestling match in overtime, senior year, his first match as captain of the team. Afterward they sat next to each other in the locker room, Jakob trying to console his friend. Slattery rocked back and forth, eyes closed, a white towel draped over his head, sweat running off his bare back. He groaned, a long, low groan, then leaned forward and struck the facing locker with his left hand. He left the room in silence, headed for the showers, leaving Jakob alone on the wooden bench staring at a caved-in locker, the upper hinges snapped clean off.

  Using his fingers, Slattery picks an uncooked grain from his fried rice, inspects it, and flicks it away. ‘The hair is a nonissue.’

  ‘Are table manners an issue? The shiny thing to the left of your plate, that’s a fork. When people eat rice they use chopsticks or a fork – a spoon, whatever – but grown people do not eat fried rice with their fingers. You have no idea how to behave. You spend the whole week figuring out how to defraud foreign governments, or whatever you do, and when you get out of there, when you’re in this strange world outside the office called reality, you have no idea how to behave. So what’s Monty? How does he rate on your little scale?’

  ‘Monty? Monty’s going to prison. He’s a flat zero.’ Slattery lifts himself half out of his chair and stretches his left leg until he hears a small pop!

  ‘Are you all right?’ asks Jakob. ‘The war wounds?’

  But Slattery’s face is dark, his nostrils flared. ‘Those little punks nearly killed me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Those punks in the four-by-four. They tried to run me over.’

  ‘You’re going to obsess on this all night, aren’t you?’

  ‘I would love to get my hands on them. Oh, Jesus. We’ll see how tough they are. Let me have each of them in a locked room for five minutes. Just give me five minutes. Then we’ll see.’

  ‘Come on, eat your spareribs. They’re getting cold.’ I’m surrounded by maniacs, thinks Jakob. The waiter lives here in furious exile; my best friend is a berserker; the man passing by the window is heading home to murder his wife. It’s a city of maniacs. What am I doing here?

  But Jakob knows he will never leave New York. He lived in Seattle for one year after college, and it didn’t take. He felt like such a stereotype of his generation – working at a coffee shop, for God’s sake, even trying to grow a goatee. After a while he realized that he didn’t really like the music he told everyone he liked; that proximity to thousands of miles of mountain biking trails did not, in fact, give him hard-ons of anticipation; that the company of his tattooed and pierced fellow espresso grinders made him feel like an extra in a music video already outdated. He went home for the Seder and realized he longed for the city and that city would always mean one place for him. Everywhere he went people begged for his return. Come back, said the beauty in leather pants working the register of a Madison Avenue boutique; come back, sang the ornery token clerks in the Union Square subway station; come back, called the hot-dog vendors outside the Metropolitan Museum; come back, Jakob, come back, the whole city shouted, come back, we’ll spell your name with window lights on the Empire State Building.

  Slattery broods over his plate of bones, the corners of his lips twitching. ‘So how’s work going?’ Jakob asks. He figures he ought to distract his friend from the angry fantasies. It seems as if Slattery is always grumpiest during cold weather: every winter of high school he starved himself to make weight, and every winter of college. He hasn’t gotten over it yet.

  Slattery says nothing for a few seconds. Then: ‘Beautiful. Everyone loves me.’

  ‘You have mustard on your chin,’ says Jakob.

  Slattery wipes it off with the back of his hand. ‘We got to get out of here. I told Monty we’d meet him at ten.’ He catches the waiter’s eye and pantomimes signing a check.

  ‘That’s eleven-thirty, M.B.T.’

  ‘Tell you what, Montgomery Brogan Time is about over. He’s going on G
overnment Time in a few hours.’

  Jakob shakes his head and watches the Sixth Avenue traffic roll through the snow. ‘It just doesn’t seem fair to me.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘Some guy stabs his wife in the face,’ says Jakob, ‘and he gets out in three years. Monty’s never been in trouble before, he doesn’t shoot anyone, he doesn’t hit anyone over the head with a baseball bat, and he’ll be in there for seven years? It’s not right.’

  Slattery takes the check from the waiter, quickly tallies the figures, and hands over his credit card.

  ‘How much do I owe?’ asks Jakob.

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘Why? No, come on, I can pay for my—;’

  ‘I got it, Jake. Don’t worry about it.’

  Jakob slumps back in his chair. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t seem fair to me.’

  ‘You’ve made that point. You’ve been saying the same thing for the last two weeks. And you’re full of shit.’

  ‘I’m full of shit? Wait, you think this is justice? You think Monty deserves—;’

  ‘Hey, I sat next to you at Aaron Haddad’s funeral. You remember his mother? They practically had to carry her in.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘The pew we were sitting in was shaking. All through the service, this pew was shaking. And I was thinking, There’s no subway underneath us, we’re on Madison Avenue. So why is the pew shaking? And then I looked over, and it was these three girls, three cute girls, crying their eyes out. They were sobbing so hard the whole pew was shaking. Well, the shit that killed Aaron is the same shit Monty sells. So don’t sit there and tell me how unfair it is poor Monty’s going away.’

  The waiter returns to their table with the credit card receipt. Slattery signs his name and pockets his copy.

  ‘When I found out about Aaron,’ says Jakob, ‘I didn’t think, Boy, I hope they find the guy who sold him that stuff. I thought, That stupid jerk, he threw it all away. Nobody made Aaron do anything. He made a choice, and he blew it. You know what? I’m sorry, I know this sounds mean, but fuck him. Mike Feaney got bone cancer, it took him four years to die, and he was fighting the whole time. And Aaron just throws it away. Fuck him.’

  ‘Fine, and fuck his mother too. The kid made a mistake. Guess what, Jake, that’s what kids do. That doesn’t make him evil.’

  ‘I didn’t say it made him evil,’ says Jakob.

  ‘It doesn’t make him deserve to die. How many times in college did I get flat drunk and drive somewhere for a pizza? Every weekend? And if I had gotten squashed on the freeway, would you be saying, Fuck him, he deserved it?’

  ‘If you got killed drunk driving, yeah, I’d think you were a stupid jerk. But I’d still miss you. And I wouldn’t go blaming the bartender for selling you the beer.’

  Slattery closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘Don’t bullshit me. Monty made money off people’s addiction. He was driving a Corvette paid for by addiction. You can hand me whatever line of crap you want, but that’s the truth. And he got caught, and he’s going away, and you know what? He’s my best friend in the world – you and him are my best friends in the world – and I love him like a brother, and he fucking deserves it.’

  But Jakob knows there can only be one best friend, only one best man at the wedding. He throws up his hands. ‘Fine. Are you going to tell him that? Are you going to say, Hey, Monty, sorry about tomorrow, brother, but you deserve it?’

  ‘No,’ says Slattery, standing. ‘I’m telling you and it stays between us. Let’s go get him.’

  Eleven

  ‘Watch me,’ says Kostya. He ducks his head and throws two left jabs, his ringed fist flashing through the air. ‘You see? Very straight line. You don’t want to come around in circle. This is what you see in movies, yes? Sylvester Stallone throwing bi-i-i-g punch like this—;’ He demonstrates the improper roundhouse. ‘You want speed, yes? Speed. What is fastest way from point A to point B?’

  ‘Straight line,’ says Volandes.

  ‘Straight line. Yes. Point A is my fist now; point B is other man’s chin. You see? Wait, I don’t want to sweat on shirt.’ Kostya begins unbuttoning his orange silk shirt. ‘This shirt I got in Miami.’

  ‘Come on, you got to get naked in my office?’ Volandes sits at his desk in his cramped, windowless office, hands behind his head. The walls are covered with framed photographs of Volandes with minor New York celebrities: the weatherman for a local television station, the Bronx borough president, a New York Yankees catcher, a radio deejay, models, actors, and singers. In all these pictures Volandes, a small man with a mane of curly black hair, wears the same gap-toothed grin, the nightclub manager’s grin. The celebrities smile wearily for the camera.

  ‘You know nothing about fine clothes, my friend. Never sweat in silk.’ Kostya folds the shirt carefully and lays it on Volandes’s bare desk.

  ‘I don’t wear silk. Too hard to clean. You’re getting fat, Novotny.’ Volandes cannot keep his eyes off the leather holster strapped to the small of Kostya’s back, the black steel butt of an automatic peeking out.

  ‘Silk is like skin of virgin’s thigh,’ says Kostya, stretching his thick arms above his head. ‘Women see man in silk, they know he has class. They know he has money. Now watch.’

  Volandes laughs. ‘They know he has class because he’s wearing the skin of a virgin’s thigh?’

  ‘Watch. American boxers, they learn to fight in ghetto. They are street fighters. Some are very good street fighters, but there is no science, no art. This is American boxer.’ Kostya throws a left-right-left combination, his head held high. ‘Good punches, yes, but look.’ He repeats the combination, his hairy belly slowly swaying. ‘No defense. You see? Face is—;’

  ‘Unprotected.’

  ‘Yes, face is unprotected. And body! American boxers, they never attack body. Everybody wants knockout. They want one big punch. No discipline, these fighters. Where I am from, Ukraine, we train from very small and we learn technique. American fighters, very good athletes. But technique, no.’

  ‘So how come there’s no champions from the Ukraine?’ asks Volandes.

  ‘Amateur champions we have. But our boxers fight in other countries only last five, six years. Soon we have champion.’

  ‘Not you, though, buddy. Not with that gut.’

  Kostya shrugs. ‘Women like men with meat. You see this?’ He fingers a long ridged scar running down from his navel under the waistband of his wool trousers. ‘When I was twelve I catch soldier raping my mother. I scream, I punch him, try to kick his balls. He takes knife and opens me up. My mother, she is trying to push me back in. My – how do you say, the coils—;’ Kostya twirls his finger to indicate coils.

  ‘Intestines?’

  ‘My intestines come falling out. So she is pushing them back in. Very bad. But see—;’ Kostya beats his chest with his fist. ‘I survive. Big man, now. Later, I find out he was not raping my mother. So, okay, he wasn’t such a bad man. He drove me to hospital.’

  ‘After he cut you up?’

  ‘Yes, but he felt very bad. I scared him. He comes back from Afghanistan. Things very bad there for Soviet soldiers. So yes, he cuts me up, but then he drives me to hospital and we become friends.’

  Volandes whistles. ‘I thought the Bronx was fucked.’

  ‘This man, this soldier, now he is my father-in-law.’

  ‘Your father-in-law?’

  ‘No, no, how do you say, he marries my mother—;’

  ‘Stepfather?’

  ‘Stepfather! Yes. He is my stepfather. Still in Ukraine, with my mother. Good man. I send them money; they live well. No money in Ukraine.’

  ‘Speaking of money,’ says Volandes, ‘tell me about tonight.’

  ‘Women love scars,’ says Kostya, rubbing the puckered skin.

  ‘You know all about women, don’t you? You know so much about women, how come you always go home with some cow at five in the morning?’

  ‘Women love scars,’ repeats
Kostya. ‘They know a man has been somewhere, he has scars.’

  ‘So what you’re telling me – I want to see if I got this right. What you’re telling me is women love fat scarred guys in silk? Acne scars, do they count?’ Volandes runs his hands over his pockmarked jaw. ‘The fat I got. Okay, tell me the plan for tonight.’

  ‘We need VIP room. Give me two staff in there. Who’s on door, Khari?’

  ‘It’s a Thursday night. You want me to close off the VIP room for the whole night?’

  ‘Uncle Blue wants VIP room.’

  Volandes sighs. ‘All right. That’s what he wants; it’s his place. We’re getting a crowd tonight. This deejay I got playing, some kid from Queens, he’s like Jesus Christ these days. Everywhere he goes there’s a crowd following him. Every high school kid in the five boroughs is going to be at the door tonight.’

  Kostya picks up his orange shirt and slides his arm through the sleeve. ‘Underage? Very dangerous. You want police in here?’

  ‘No,’ says Volandes. ‘I said at the door. I didn’t say they were getting in.’

  ‘Khari’s working the VIP room tonight?’

  ‘No, Khari’s working the front. I need him out there, with the mess we’re going to have. If you had told me about this earlier, I would have said do it another night. Everything’s crazy when this deejay plays.’

  ‘Another night?’ asks Kostya, buttoning his shirt and tucking it inside his pants. ‘Montgomery goes to prison tomorrow. You want we should give him party tomorrow night?’

  ‘How about last night? Last night was empty.’

  Kostya frowns. ‘My friend goes to prison tomorrow for seven years. You talk about crowded? About your deejay?’

  ‘All right,’ says Volandes, raising his hands. ‘I’m sorry. I like Monty; he’s a good kid. Okay, two VIP staff. I’ll put Oscar on VIP door. Girls?’

  ‘Two girls. Maybe three. He likes – he likes everything, but mostly short, dark. Puerto Ricans. He likes Puerto Ricans.’

  ‘That’s easy.’ Volandes picks up the phone and pushes a button. ‘Get Roz and Maggie in here . . . Huh? Where is she? . . . Oh, Christ. Well track her down, would you? Tell Roz to come in here.’ He replaces the phone in its cradle.