Casino Moon

by Peter Blauner

  “Excuse me,” Sam said. “But who are you?”

  “Oh, this here is my business partner.” John looped an arm around my shoulders. “Anthony’s just helping us out with our organization.”

  “I’m just looking out for everybody’s best interest.”

  Sam checked me out like a butcher inspecting a bad piece of meat. “John,” he said, without taking his eyes off me, “I thought surely you’d understand we can’t put a champion in the ring with a fighter who’s no longer ranked in the top ten. We couldn’t sell a noncompetitive fight like that. Our markets wouldn’t take it.”

  “So how do we get our guy ranked?” I asked.

  Sam’s mouth turned into a thin line of disapproval. “Well, John,” he said. “As I’m sure you know, that decision would be up to the World Boxing Federation.”

  “And who do we talk to there?”

  Wolkowitz raised one eyebrow and looked from me to John B., as if asking, “Is this guy for real?” A couple of minutes ago he’d thought I was some gay flirt.

  “The head of the WBF is Mr. Pedro Hoyas Ospina.” Wolkowitz examined his buffed nails. “A great advocate and a very dear personal friend. I often go down to visit him at the headquarters in Panama. The common view—and I’m not saying I agree or disagree—is that he controls the ranking system. I believe he’ll be appearing on the panel today.”

  Wolkowitz nodded toward the stage at the front of the ballroom, where various fighters and casino executives were taking seats on a long wooden dais with a blue-and-gold Doubloon banner hanging off the front.

  “So you’re saying that if we get to this Ospina, we got a shot at the fight?” I asked Wolkowitz.

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m just putting things in context. You have to respect the integrity of the process.”

  Oh go fuck yourself, I thought. I smiled as he shook John B.’s hand and gave me a sidelong glance.

  “Good luck to you, John,” he said. “And be careful about the kind of company you keep.”

  He drifted away like smoke off a cheap cigar and the press conference began. Pedro Hoyas Ospina of the WBF got up to make a speech. A little fireplug of a man with skin like a bad fruit and a tan leisure suit. He looked like someone Teddy might have had parking his car a few years ago. He began talking about how much he loved boxing and how he’d sacrificed everything in his life for the sport. He grew up in a little town near Caracas, he said, where a boy had to learn how to fight or dress up like a chicken for a month and let other children pluck him.

  “I made myself,” he said with a choked-up, heavy accent. “That little chicken grew up to be a man ... A man ... Oh God!”

  Then he started crying big honking sobs and burying his face in his handkerchief. Other people looked down and shook their heads, like they’d all shared the pain of dressing up like a chicken.

  “Jesucristo, I love America,” Pedro Hoyas Ospina said between honks.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around, expecting John B. to tell me something. Instead there was a tall, pale man wearing chinos and a white silk shirt with a paisley ascot underneath it.

  “I understand you wish to speak with the commissioner,” he said, bowing slightly to John B. and then me.

  Soft hands, light Spanish accent, skin as smooth as a leather briefcase at an airport duty-free shop. Obviously not a street guy like Ospina. I wondered if he was the appointments secretary or something.

  “Yeah,” said John B. “My brother, he’s looking to get the title belt put back around his middle, where it belong.”

  “Ah, yes, your brother Elijah,” said the man in the paisley ascot. “We’ve often passed pleasant afternoons playing golf on the courses of South Florida. Many humorous hours have gone by, looking for his balls in the woods.”

  He smiled at us, but something about him made my gut squirm. He said his name was Eddie Suarez. I couldn’t figure out how he knew what we wanted. I’d seen Sam Wolkowitz go up to the panel on the stage and sit down next to Pedro Hoyas Ospina without giving any signal.

  “So your brother is intent on making a comeback,” said Eddie Suarez, standing with his back against a long marble pillar as Ospina went into the tenth minute of his speech.

  “We want to see him get ranked,” I jumped in. “We understand it’s the only way he can get the fight.”

  Suarez solemnly touched his lips with his fingertips. “You know, my friends, the commissioner is very concerned about the youth of today. Many more temptations are available to them. The drugs, the credit cards, the pornographic videos .. .”

  “They have it too easy!” said John B.

  “The commissioner feels it is important for the youth to have an outlet for their . . . energies,” Suarez continued. “A place to go. You understand. So that is why the commissioner wishes to build a gymnasium in Panama City.”

  “What do you want us to do about it?” I asked.

  Suarez’s eyes got a little wider and a little darker, as if they were trying to fill the gaps in what he was saying. “A contribution is needed. Certainly you are both familiar with the high cost of construction, even in a country as poor as ours.”

  “Yeah, so for how much?” I asked.

  “In the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars,” he said.

  I whistled loud enough to turn several heads nearby.

  “So this is a bribe?”

  His smile said you wouldn’t want to see his frown. “I have no authority,” he told us. “I’m merely a friend to all parties. A builder of bridges.”

  Fair enough. I guess a lot of bridge builders get paid off too. Except we were already fifty thousand dollars in the hole for the normal expenses.

  I swallowed hard and tried to look unconcerned. If we didn’t pay this guy off, we couldn’t get Elijah rated in the WBF top ten, and therefore, the TV guy Wolkowitz wouldn’t talk to us. In my father’s trade this was what was known as a shakedown. Except these guys had custom-made suits and corporate offices. I should’ve turned on my heel and left right then. They were exactly the same as Teddy’s crew. It mademe think of that kid’s game, Chutes and Ladders. You start off at the bottom and end up at the bottom with hardly any time in between.

  But it was still my one chance at getting out. Sure, boxing was a dirty business, but it was a way into the legitimate world, where I belonged. I couldn’t go back and work for Teddy in six months. So instead of Chutes and Ladders, I told myself it was an obstacle course, with a great reward waiting for me at the end.

  I asked Suarez for his card and said we’d get back to him.

  “Do not make the mistake of waiting too long, my friends,” he warned us. “This fight is scheduled for ten weeks from today. It is possible another light heavyweight may be chosen from the ranks.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same as having Elijah up there,” John B. told him in a panicky voice.

  I tried to play it cool. “We’ll come to terms when we come to terms,” I said. “We’re not desperate, you know.”

  13

  P.F. WASN’T SURE if it was the hangover or the clams that were nauseating him as he stood in front of the grocery on Florida Avenue, talking to Teddy and his two soldiers, Joey Snails and Richie Amato.

  “So I’ve been asking myself,” said P.F. with a hand over his stomach. “Who would wanna do a thing like that to poor Larry DiGregorio? Senseless.”

  The heat was like a gorilla suit. Teddy, sitting on a milk crate, pried open a clam, sucked out its insides, and threw the shell into a white plastic bucket at his feet.

  “That’s three times I been asked the same question,” he told P.F. “First I had the feebs. Then the state troopers and now I got you. The man was a friend of mine. Ask anybody. I never wanted to see him chopped up like that.”

  On their milk crates nearby, Richie and Joey Snails exchanged bad-boy smiles and talked about the movie Dances With Wolves. The baking sun turned the sidewalks salt white and conjured a murky stench from the bucket at Teddy’s feet.


  P.F. felt the gorge rising in his throat. “Well the word is you were having some kind of problem with Larry’s son Nicky . . .”

  “Ah, bullshit.” Teddy struggled for a few seconds with a clam that wouldn’t open and then tossed it into the bucket at his feet. “You know the only reason you come around asking questions like that is because I have a last name that ends in a vowel. It’s discrimination, that’s what it is. Being Irish and a drunk like you are I would’ve expected better from you.”

  P.F. gave up a smile he’d meant to keep to himself. On his crate, Joey Snails put his fingers up to his head like horns and told Richie “de-tonka” was Indian for buffalo.

  “God forbid a robin should fall out of a tree, I’d get blamed for it,” Teddy went on. “Why don’t you do something about real crime? I heard there was a shooting down in the Inlet last night. I don’t see you working on that.”

  “I had no idea you were so concerned about the violence in our minority community. You ought to think about organizing a volunteer patrol.”

  “There’s crime going on everywhere, you wanna look for it. Look across the street there.”

  Teddy pointed to a small Vietnamese restaurant with a yellow-and-red sign out front. “Every night I see twelve guys coming and going out the back of that place,” he said. “So don’t tell me they haven’t got a card game going back there or an illegal shipping operation.”

  Three young Asian men dressed in black and wearing sunglasses got into a white Lexus and drove away laughing.

  “Sure that’s not just jealousy?” asked P.F.

  He’d heard Teddy was getting squeezed these days. Something about Jackie from New York coming into town.

  “Poor fuckin’ buffalo,” said Joey Snails. “They hadda go whack most of ’em. But there are still a few left. I saw some the other day when I was driving up the Turnpike ...”

  “Get the fuck outa here,” said Richie, admiring the new biceps and traps the steroids had given him. “There ain’t no buffalo in Jersey. They’re all in upstate New York. That’s why they named a town after them ...”

  Teddy coughed uncomfortably and dropped another clam in the bucket. “You know,” he said, looking up at P.F. “I hope you didn’t come by here looking for a payoff again, like you used to with your old partner.”

  The memory and the gorge in P.F.’s throat seemed to rise simultaneously. Twenty years ago. Coming by with Paulie Raymond, to collect televisions and carpets as bribes.

  “No,” P.F. said, trying to keep himself bottled up. “That was Paulie’s game. I was just along for the ride.”

  “Good thing too,” Teddy grumbled. “’Cause there ain’t any more where all that came from. A man oughta work for a living anyway.”

  “I had occasion to think of those days recently.” P.F. cleared his throat. “Michael Dillon. He was a friend of yours too. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

  Teddy took part of a clam into his mouth and spit the rest of it into his bucket. “I don’t know. Maybe a building fell on him. He wasn’t too cautious, you know. Mike.”

  P.F. remembered. The smiling tan face. The shoes that he couldn’t afford. And the payoff Paulie took to stop investigating his murder. Thinking about it was like picking at an old scab.

  “I wouldn’t go around asking too many questions about that,” Teddy warned him with hard, slitted eyelids. “It might reflect badly on you, if you know what I mean.”

  Joey leaned over and asked Richie if he thought a buffalo would make a good coat.

  P.F. put up a hand like he was trying to slow traffic. “I just came by to see what you knew about Larry,” he said. “I remembered he was a friend of yours and thought you might have something to add to the investigation.”

  “And I already told you. I don’t know nothing about nothing.” Teddy went back to concentrating on his clams.

  “Beautiful,” said P.F. “No wonder you go around confused all the time.”

  14

  VIN HAD FINALLY ARRANGED for me to pick up theweekly envelope from the roofers’ union, but I wanted nothing to do with that. I was determined to raise the boxing money legitimately. What I found out, though, is when you try doing things in a legitimate way, people can get hurt too.

  A week after I’d seen Elijah Barton at his house, I was home having dinner with my wife Carla. The kids were in the next room, watching some piece of mayhem on the VCR. He-Ra the Slaughterer or She-Man the Magnificent, one of those superhero cartoons about people getting their skulls crushed. I was eating the Spaghetti-Os that Carla had heated up—little ringlets of death—and thinking about how I’d improve my diet once I started to make some real money.

  Then out of the blue, Carla looked up and said, “I got a call from Mr. Schwarzberg at the bank today.”

  We’d barely spoken since that blowup we’d had about the couch. I just sat there, stupefied.

  “Yeah, what’d he want?”

  “He said you were talking to him this morning about us getting a second mortgage.” She opened her right hand like a fan. She’d painted all five nails fire engine red.

  The house we lived in wasn’t what you’d call spacious in the best of times. But now I felt the off-white ceiling getting a little lower.

  “Schwarzberg called you about the mortgage?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You didn’t say nothin’ to me about that.”

  She took out an emery board and began filing her fingernails with it. I felt sick. Not just because chipped bits of fingernail might go flying in the red sauce, but because it was the type of thing her mother might do. Marie the cow.Teddy’s sister. Filing her nails over a steaming plate of linguini while her husband Jack droned on about scamming auto insurance companies.

  “Well, we haven’t been saying much of anything to each other lately,” I said.

  Even though we’d been fighting, I hadn’t quite lost all the feeling I had for Carla. Maybe because we’d been through so much together. She turned sideways in her chair and rested her hand on where the baby’s spine would be.

  “And what kind of second mortgage you think we’re gonna get?” she asked as if she was just curious.

  “I don’t know. I thought we could maybe renegotiate a home equity mortgage. See how it goes. What’d we start off with? A house worth fifty-five thousand dollars? I figure it’s worth almost twice that now.”

  Her face got all knotted up and for a second I thought the baby must’ve kicked her in the kidneys. Something about having this third kid had really put the years on Carla. All of a sudden she was starting to look like her mother, heavy under the chin and sad around the eyes.

  “What’re you, crazy?” she said. “You think this house is worth more now than when we bought it? You take a look outside lately?”

  Our house was a blue two-story with a red triangular roof and a brown porch in what used to be a beautiful neighborhood. Years ago, it was all Italian, maybe a couple of Jews, and not a single piece of trash on the street. People used to be able to leave their doors unlocked at night. Now vandals regularly broke into the abandoned houses on the block to steal the plumbing fixtures and sell the parts for scrap. Some of the other houses were falling apart because the old Jews who used to live there moved down beach to Margate and rented their places to four or five Asian or Puerto Rican families at a time. When you walked by, you’d see the broken windows and the children scrawling graffiti on the walls.

  “You never know. Things could turn around.”

  Carla dropped her fork and her cheeks started to get all red and puffed again. “Anthony,” she said, “the man told me you wanted a loan of thirty-five thousand dollars.”

  I was hoping she wouldn’t find out about that. The guy at the bank said he’d call back, but I’d been counting on picking up the phone myself.

  “Listen, if you didn’t spend money like we were at a county auction, I wouldn’t have to do this. It’s only ’cause we don’t save like we should. That’s why I need the money right away.”<
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  She deflected the lie like a champion turning away a weak left jab. “What’re you telling me? You’re in so deep to a bookmaker you gotta borrow thirty-five thousand dollars?”

  Her nostrils were flaring, like they always did when we were arguing. I decided I wasn’t going to knuckle under, though.

  “Never mind what I need it for,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand anyway.”

  “Anthony, they’re gonna charge like eight and a half percent interest!” She leaned forward, pressing the baby in her stomach against the table. “You’ll be dead before you finish paying off the interest. We’ve barely made a dent in the fifty-five we owed them in the first place.”

  I suddenly had this vision of us sitting in this same kitchen fifty years in the future, all old, worn-out and toothless, with the kettle on and the ceiling falling in on us. Her in her mother’s housecoat, her flabby arms hanging out like dead flounders. Me in the same cheap moth-eaten suit. Talking about the good old days that weren’t actually that good.

  “You just don’t understand the way things could be,” I said, raising my voice. “You were the one saying I was stuck in the rut. Now I’m trying to get us out of it and you’re slapping me down.”

  She put a hand on her forehead. “What’re you saying?”

  “I’m saying I need this money to start up a new business.”

  “What new business?”

  I wasn’t going to tell her about the boxing and let her call me crazy or stupid. It was too early and I needed to work some things out. So instead I shifted the subject. “I can’t go on the way I was,” I said. “Construction is dead in this town.”

  “But if there ain’t no more construction, how can our house be worth more?” she asked, half rising in her seat tomake the point. “Don’t you get it? If you’re saying Atlantic City is dead, our house can’t be worth any more than we paid for it. We haven’t got the assets. What’re you gonna tell the bank appraiser when he comes to our house?”