by David Gordon
“Gio!” He stood, removing the white napkin from his collar and revealing his three-piece navy-pinstripe suit, light-blue shirt, and electric-blue tie. Diamonds glittered on his rings and watch face and in his earlobes. Gio, too, was sharply dressed—they often talked fabrics and swapped tailors—but more sedately, in a linen summer suit, white shirt, and pale-blue tie. He wore no jewelry besides his wedding ring and his Rolex, a birthday gift from his wife and kids. They hugged.
“You hungry?” Alonzo asked as Gio and Nero sat down. Gio’s other guy, Big Eddie, lingered by the door with Barry. Once they got done eyeballing each other, they’d spend the time happily, discussing protein shake recipes and workout routines. “Not to brag,” Alonzo told them, “but the food here’s like my grandma made, if she’d raised her own organic chickens and had a pure maple syrup connect from Vermont.”
“It smells amazing,” Gio said, which was true. “But I will just take a coffee for now and come back for dinner another night.” It was ten in the morning, after all, and he had a lunch with some bankers in Midtown later.
“Alright then.” Alonzo tossed his napkin on the table. “Let’s settle this shit.” He called to Barry: “Get Cold in here.”
The bodyguard went to the door that led to the dining room and stuck his head through, while a young woman wearing kitchen whites and a scarf over her braids served the coffee, then returned to a nearby counter and began expertly chopping greens with a huge gleaming knife. Cold Daddy Collins entered, also in a suit but flashier than Alonzo and Gio, light green with wide lapels and a matching hat. He had a thug in a tight T-shirt and wraparound shades with him, incongruously holding a briefcase. For the past week, he and his friends had been making noise, and finally Collins had asked Alonzo to arrange a sit-down.
“Gio, this is my associate Cold Daddy Collins. Cold, this is my old friend Gio Caprisi.”
“Nice to meet you,” Gio said, half rising and shaking his hand.
“It’s an honor, Mr. Caprisi,” Cold replied, looking from Gio to Alonzo. Alonzo nodded and they sat. Cold cleared his throat.
“First of all, I want to say that if I’d known it was your place I never would have rolled up on it like that. And my boy, Li’l Whitey. He should never have disrespected the club.”
Gio smiled. “He should know better than to put his hands on a woman like that anywhere. She’s the one he disrespected.”
“True. He shouldn’t have grabbed that pussy. Look, I ain’t gonna lie, his nickname around the office is Li’l Tighty, because he’s such a puckered asshole, but that asshole shit out a million downloads last month, so …”
Gio glanced at Alonzo, who shrugged. Cold’s music label was making a fortune off of Li’l Whitey, and Alonzo was raking it in, too, as his silent partner.
“I understand,” Gio said, being reasonable. “Business is business. No reason to let a small misunderstanding get in the way. I suggest we just forget the whole thing. No hard feelings.”
Alonzo smiled. “Thanks for being so understanding, Gio.” He turned to Cold. “See, I told you. We’re all businessmen here. No time for gangster nonsense. Let’s just go forward as if this never happened.”
“Excellent,” Cold said. “Now, just one final thing.” He held his hand out and his bodyguard pulled a folder from the briefcase and handed it to him. He opened it on the table, revealing a stack of legal documents. “I had my lawyers draw up these simple nondisclosure agreements. If you could just sign and get your people to do the same.”
Gio stared at the papers for a long beat, while Alonzo and Nero stared at him carefully, bracing for his reaction. Then he burst into laughter. Relieved, Alonzo and Nero laughed, too. Furious, Cold jumped to his feet, pounding the table and spilling coffee all over the papers, which his sidekick tried to blot.
“You laughing at me? You know what it will do to sales if word gets out that Li’l Whitey got bitch slapped … by a bitch? That’s my money you’re fucking with right there. And your bouncer broke my fighter’s arm! He had to cancel his next match.” He pointed a thick, jewel-encrusted finger at Gio. “Way I see it, your people cost me a fortune. But I’m settling it like a gentleman on account of my boy Alonzo here. So I suggest you stop laughing, motherfucker.”
Gio stopped laughing. His dark brown eyes seemed to go truly black as they focused on that thick finger. “Excuse me, miss,” he called to the cook who was chopping greens nearby. “Can you come here for just one minute?”
The girl stopped, the staccato rhythm of her blade ceasing as she stepped over curiously.
“Alonzo,” Gio said. “Do you like Japanese gangster movies as much as I do?”
Alonzo, who’d been holding his breath, was caught off guard. “Movies? Yeah, sure, Gio. They’re pretty cool.”
“They are, right? And you know how there’s always that part where some yakuza disrespects one of his superiors? Remember what they make him do?”
Now Alonzo nodded, grimly. “Yeah, sure. They make him chop off a finger.”
“That’s right,” Gio said. He nodded at the young cook. “Honey, let Mr. Cold here borrow your knife for a second.”
Wide-eyed, she held it out. Cold looked back and forth from the knife to the stony faces around the table. None smiled or laughed now. Gio stared right at him and spoke in the same even tone. “Put your hand on the table.”
“What the fuck?” Cold said. “I thought you said this was just business, man. Money.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll let you keep the ring. I just want my finger.”
Alonzo spoke up. “With all due respect, Gio, I do believe that in those movies it’s a pinky they cut.”
Gio’s eyes were blank and soulless as a lizard’s. “Then he should have pointed a pinky at me, shouldn’t he?”
Alonzo leaned in and whispered to Gio. “Look, I’m going to ask you to let this go as a favor here, to me, and promise you, personally, that there will be no more trouble from him or any of his people. Or I will be cutting off some things my own self. And they won’t be fingers. This kid doesn’t know shit. If he did, he’d know that no one here needs to sign shit. Your handshake is enough.” Alonzo held out a hand. After a beat, Gio shook it. Then he stood up.
“Thanks for the coffee,” he said to Alonzo. Then to the cook: “And miss, whatever you’re cooking, smells great.”
“Thanks,” she said softly. Then he walked out, trailed by Nero and Big Eddie. The door shut behind them.
Cold sat back, sighing. The girl silently returned to her chopping. Alonzo shook his head. “You dumbass motherfucker. You lucky he didn’t just chop your head off right here and drop it in my grits pot. I wouldn’t blame him neither. Papers? Gangsters don’t sign fucking papers. What kind of weak-ass limp-dick bougie shit is that?” Cold shrugged, gathering the wet papers and stuffing them back in the briefcase.
“That’s what my lawyer told me,” he huffed. “And like you said, we businessmen.”
“Listen.” Alonzo leaned in. “Let me make it clear to you. What we were saying before about us all being businessmen?”
Cold nodded.
“Well that was a bunch of bullshit. You a businessman in a gangster suit. That man there, in the business suit? That was a fucking gangster.”
*
Gio and Nero and Big Eddie waited till they got outside and the door closed behind them, before they started laughing.
“Holy shit, G,” Nero said, lighting a smoke. “For a second there you had me going, too. I thought you were really going to make that mutt chop his own finger off.”
“I’m glad we ain’t yakuza,” Big Eddie said, regarding his own diamond pinkie ring. He could think of at least a hand’s worth of screwups in his own career. Were there Japanese gangsters walking around missing five or six fingers? Did they use up one hand at a time or do both pinkies first?
Gio grinned. “I bet he shit that silk suit. Don’t smoke in the car.”
“No, I wasn’t going to,” Nero said, quickly, taking a long
draw and stamping it out, although in point of fact, it was his car. Big Eddie opened the front passenger door and Gio got in. Eddie and Pete got in back. Nero drove. As he pulled into the road, a phone rang, and Pete answered.
“Yeah? Who’s this? Hold on.” He leaned forward to Gio, covering the phone. “It’s Little Maria, Boss. For you.”
Gio spoke over his shoulder. “Don’t answer like that, Pete. Say: ‘May I ask who’s calling?’ And then ask them to please hold for me, all right?”
“Sorry, Boss,” Pete said, then spoke into the phone: “Please hold for Gio.”
Gio sighed. “Thanks, Pete.” He took the phone. “Good morning, Maria, how can I help you today?”
“Gio, mi papi chulo, we need to talk.” She spoke in a lilting Dominican accent that somehow reminded him of his own grandmother. And like his nonna, Little Maria was very small and very tough. Her husband had controlled much of the heroin trade in Washington Heights and the Bronx. When he died she not only held on to his business, she expanded it.
“Sure Maria. What about?”
“Is about your friend Joe.”
“Fuck!” Gio slammed the dashboard, and Nero glanced quickly in the rearview to see Eddie and Pete sitting still as statues. “What the hell did he do now?”
“Do? I don’t understand. He didn’t do nothing. Yet. But what he need to do, baby, you don’t want me to say that on the phone.”
10
Joe felt better. He’d been under Dr. Zhang’s care for a week.
The whole thing could not be less like what the movies had led him to imagine: there were no statues of Buddha, no shave-headed monks chanting or sweeping up, no incense burning, just a crowded waiting room full of old Chinese people blabbing on cell phones, kids running around or playing on the floor, and a couple of harried young female receptionists in tight jeans, heels, and cute baby T’s. His was the only white face. When he and Cash sat down, one of the girls came over with a clipboard of forms and asked him about insurance, but Cash had spoken harshly to her in Chinese and after that she left him alone. He was addressed only as Joe. He then called Gladys, his grandmother, and Cash drove to her place, where she handed him a thick envelope of hundreds drawn from the stash he had given her to hold, along with a shopping bag containing his toothbrush, clean T-shirts and underwear, and the book from his night table, a one-volume paperback of Beckett’s novel trilogy. He was rereading Molloy. Cash handed it directly to Dr. Zhang.
That first day, she examined him, though not in a way any doctor had before: among other things, she inspected his tongue very closely and took his two pulses separately, tut-tutting to herself about how far out of balance he was. She asked him in embarrassing detail about his bathroom habits and his sleeping and eating and seemed deeply interested in a way no one had since he was a small child. Somehow he felt relaxed with her and answered frankly, detailing his drug use, his withdrawal symptoms, his nightmares. She was a small, sturdy woman with a round, open face and a bluntly cut black bob, dressed in a white lab coat, her penetrating gaze assessing him with sharp intelligence from behind round glasses. She spoke perfect clipped English with a soft accent and jokingly referred to herself as Shanghainese rather than Chinese—something that, as a New Yorker, he could understand. She wore a wedding ring and had pictures of herself skiing with children on her desk, but he would have guessed she was a mom anyway. She listened to him with a slight frown, scolded him for bad behavior, and handled him with gentle care, assuring him that his problem was well within her powers to solve, physically at least. Then she led him back through the waiting room, down a long hall with doors on both sides, and into a small exam room, where she had him strip to his underwear and lie down on a massage table. She got out her acupuncture needles and, when he flinched, gave him her mom look and said: “I know you’re not afraid of needles.” He laughed and lay still while she stuck him in the ears, the hands, between the toes, then hooked him up to electricity and sent a current through him. The weird feeling was unlike any he’d ever had, kind of like hitting your funny bone, but all over his body. “Relax,” she told him, spreading a towel over him and dimming the light as she turned on a heat lamp. He wanted to tell her, “Are you nuts, how can I relax with electrified needles stuck all over me?” But she’d cowed him enough to keep him quiet, and a moment later, without even realizing it, he’d fallen asleep.
He slept like hadn’t slept since childhood, deep and dreamless, and awoke refreshed and alert, unlike from the drugged stupors he doctored up for himself. An old lady he hadn’t seen before, in Chinese pajama pants, house slippers, and an incongrous Hollister T-shirt, gave him a robe and, using hand gestures since she spoke no English, escorted him to a plain bedroom deeper in the building, more like a basic hotel room than a hospital. She came back with a bowl of white rice and a cup of weak sweet tea. He consumed it and went to sleep again.
The second day was more acupuncture and Dr. Z started the herbs, capsules that looked like vitamins and bags of homemade tea that she said would help him detox faster and with less suffering. She was right. It helped, but he still had the symptoms: the diarrhea, the chills and fevers, the runny nose and eyes. But the worst, always, was that horrible empty feeling in his bones, that puppet-like twitching in his joints as his body jerked compulsively, trying to find a position in which it was comfortable for more than a few seconds. He would describe it as a soul sickness, if in fact the soul were a material entity, a ghost that waxed and waned, a warm, vital substance that could turn to cold slime and clammy vapor in your marrow.
But as the days passed, under her care, he got better, sleeping through the night, waking without nightmares, eating full meals and drinking only water, juice, and herbal tea. After a week, he felt really good. Better than he had in a long time. And that scared him, for as every junkie knows, it is when you are feeling better that you are most in danger, most susceptible to the little voice, the demon in your ear, telling you that one won’t hurt.
It was with this in mind that he went to the VA hospital. In the morning, Cash drove him over to the large facility on East Twenty-Third in Manhattan, and by the time he walked back out, six hours later, even a Mormon Olympic athlete would have been ready for a double shot of Jack with a Morphine chaser. First, he waited at the front desk, then followed the vague directions to various departments that sent him to other departments that sent him back to the first department, with long waits in between at the elevators, most of which were out of order. Finally he ended up back on the ground floor, in a large waiting room that was like a combination nursing home, emergency room, and psych ward, with a homeless shelter thrown in. A row of ancients sat moldering in wheelchairs, some hooked to IVs, some drooling, some staring into the distance. A bum slept across three seats, his ripe scent indicating a long tenure on the streets. A few guys mumbled to themselves as they paced or twitched.
Most people, however, were just sitting and reading or playing with their phones or spacing out with the tense yet hopeless gaze of those lost in transition, grounded in an airport or parked in the DMV, except that a larger proportion were coughing or sneezing or scratching or sweating or moaning, which definitely did not make Joe feel better. It might be wiser to just go home with his PTSD and blossoming drug habit than trade it in here for something even worse. But he stayed, sitting across from a Latina woman with one leg, holding her prosthetic foot under her arm like an umbrella on a sunny day. Hours passed. Joe tried to read, but somehow thinking about Molloy’s broken figure dragging across a bleak and blasted landscape concentrated rather than relieved his present tension. Then the woman was called, and an obese white man with an oxygen tank and an unzipped fly took her place, hacking richly without covering his mouth. Finally, just as Joe was deciding that this in fact was going to trigger a PTSD episode itself, he was called into an office for intake.
Ten minutes later he was done: his sealed or excised and redacted records, combined with the fact that he was forbidden to name or even describe
any of the highly classified traumatic events he had experienced, left him in a bureaucratic limbo: he could not get treatment because he could not prove that his condition existed, despite having all the symptoms. The social worker he saw was sympathetic. Genuinely distressed and stressed—with crumbs on her blouse from eating at her desk, files stacked to the ceiling and two pairs of glasses, one on her nose, one pushed up into her messy, gray hair—she had dedicated her life to serving those who served, so Joe just thanked her for trying and left. But as soon as he stepped outside he had something like a small panic attack, more from pent-up claustrophobia, frustration, and an almost toxic overdose of boredom than anything else. He crossed the small island of greenery in front of the main entrance and sat down on the first bench he saw, shutting his eyes and trying to take deep breaths.
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
The voice was not Joe’s and he felt reasonably sure it was not coming from inside his head. He opened his eyes. An old black man was sitting beside him. He wore a blue cotton work shirt, a checkered cap, tan carpenter’s pants, and construction boots with paint splattered all over them. He had glasses on a string around his neck and held a cane.
“Sorry?” Joe asked.
“From here.” He tapped the book in Joe’s hand. “Though it’s Godot I think of every time I walk through those doors.” He stuck out his hand. “Frank Jones, USMC.”
Joe shook it. “Joe Brody. Army. Nice to meet you.” He was a big man in well-used work clothes, but his hand was smooth and graceful.
“Where’d you serve Joe?”
Joe shrugged. “I got around quite a bit.”
Frank peered at him from under his cap. “Special Forces?”
“Apparently that’s classified.”
Frank nodded. “I hear you. I was sixteen when I went to Vietnam. Never even occurred to me anyplace could be worse than Harlem. When I came back I grew my hair out and stayed as high as I could for the next decade. My first wife didn’t even know I’d served. She was a hippie chick, a Jewish girl from Long Island. It wouldn’t have gone over too well, me being a baby killer. So I forgot it all even happened and joined the peace-and-love generation.”