Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  “He needs to learn some manners.”

  “What am I gonna tell the brass? Huh? What?”

  “Tell them he hurt it pulling it out of his ass.”

  “The son of a bitch will be claiming he’s permanently disabled. You know that, don’t ya?”

  “From a broken thumb?”

  “These kids are like that, man. They get a blood blister, they’re looking for workman’s comp.”

  Halfway across the wide expanse of lobby, I stopped and pointed back toward the elevators. “Are those the only way down?”

  “Except for the stairs and freight elevator in the back.”

  “Is the freight elevator keyed?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  I again started toward the escalator.

  “I’m going to need to put a couple of guys here in the lobby.”

  “Not those friggin’ bums, you’re not. You may think you’ve got big-time juice with the suits, but you start hanging that crew of yours around here in the lobby, I don’t care if it’s old Sir Larry Olivier watching out for you, you’re all gonna find your asses back out in the street where they belong.”

  He had a point. The Olympic was the sort of place which considered matching shoes and a full set of teeth to be pretty much de rigueur. My crew was great for the streets. Out there, they were virtually invisible. We’ve trained our eyes not to see the poor and the homeless. We tell ourselves that these people had their chance. That the rewards of the free society were once theirs for the taking, and they blew it. That they were either unwilling or unable to carpe the diem when opportunity knocked…so screw ’em.

  “I’ll clean a couple of them up,” I promised.

  “This I gotta see.”

  Me too, I thought. I tried something else.

  “Why in God’s name did you put Meyerson and Del Fuego on the same floor? Wasn’t that just asking for trouble?”

  “They insisted, goddammit. So worried that one was going to have something the other one didn’t have. One more room. One more chair. Christ. The fourteenth floor has the only two identical suites.’

  I changed the subject. “Have you got cameras on all the floors?”

  “That’s proprietarial information.”

  “Well, in the event that you do, turn on fourteen and eight.”

  “They’re only on the private floors. Fourteen through eighteen.”

  “Why only the private floors?”

  “Same reason as everything else—the suits won’t pay for it.”

  “Well, fire up fourteen, then.”

  “What I’d like to be able to fire up is nine, so I could keep an eye on you. I hear you’re going to be our guest.”

  As we walked, I reached over and tapped him on the chest. “That’s right, and remember, Marty, a guest is a jewel that rests upon a pillow of hospitality.”

  “My ass.”

  “There’s an idea I hadn’t thought of.”

  “What?”

  “You could tell the brass he broke his thumb pulling it out of your ass.”

  “Har, har,” he hacked at my back.

  I stepped onto the escalator and started down. Marty stood at the top and watched my descent. He looked sad, like a hound dog caught with its nose in the kitchen garbage. From my lowered perspective, the bags under his eyes seemed to nearly reach his ears. I waved bye-bye.

  Five minutes and fifteen dollars later, the Fiat magically reappeared in the circular drive. The front of the little car scraped slightly as I bounced out onto University Avenue and gunned it up the hill toward the freeway.

  I don’t care what the poet said; around here, September is the cruelest month. Just about the time the kiddies are headed back to school, when the resorts are closing up for the season and those of us still propelled by the agrarian calendar feel a need to buckle down in preparation for a long, rainy winter, the weather has this annoying propensity to get nice and to stay that way.

  The digital readout on the Safeco Building alternated between eleven-fifteen A.M. and seventy-nine degrees as I pushed the Fiat north toward home, getting off at Forty-fifth, winding my way down under the bridge, heading west toward Fremont.

  Fremont is a neighborhood for people who don’t have to commute. One of those bohemian pockets of urbanity to which there is, quite literally, no quick or easy route. On a bad day, covering the few miles from the freeway to Fremont can take thirty minutes. Today was a bad day. Still, I was going to miss the place.

  You want Guatemalan Expressionist art, we got it. You want a giant concrete sculpture of a troll eating a VW, we got that too. What about an intact Cold War rocket, repainted and mounted atop a building?

  Say no more. And that’s not the best of it. Lenin is the best of it. Directly across North Thirty-fifth Street stands a sixteen-foot, seven-ton bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin, striding out with his greatcoat open to the breeze and his thick boots threatening to shatter the pavement beneath his feet.

  A local entrepreneur named Lew Carpenter found the statue in the newly liberated Poprad, Slovakia, where it lay as a toppled symbol of Communism’s fall. The rest is, as they say, history. Lenin now stands with his back to the Fremont Hemp Company, striding directly toward the Rocket. Two defanged symbols of the Cold War, forever reaching out, but like Keats’s lovers, never quite making contact. Art, once again, outlives politics. Dude.

  It was eleven-forty when I kicked the paper through the open front door. I stood in the doorway, watching it slide across the hardwood floor and bump into the nearest cardboard box. One of about forty such boxes into which my gross lifetime product was presently stored.

  Moving is an experience that becomes increasingly difficult with age. When I was younger, moving wasn’t a problem, because I didn’t actually live anywhere, I crashed wherever it was convenient. Friends used to keep entire pages of their address books blank, knowing that the constant changes in my address and phone number would require all that space and more.

  Today, the sight of my bare walls gave me the willies. I had to force myself over the threshold, over toward the phone and the Rolodex, which rested on the big wardrobe box. I checked the number and dialed my aunt Karen in Building Permits.

  I figured my stock was high with Karen. Just a couple of months ago, I’d managed to show up at the wedding of her youngest daughter, Mary Alice, in a suit, with a present. What a guy.

  She answered the phone before it rang. “Building Permits.”

  “Karen, it’s Leo.”

  “Hey, good-lookin’.”

  “I need a small favor.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Before I could tell her what I wanted, she jumped in.

  “You know Jean’s boy Harvey is getting married again.”

  I could see it coming. “What’s with these people? They get married like other people change their socks.”

  She ignored me. “Two weeks from next Sunday. That’s the thirtieth.”

  Five minutes later, we’d exchanged my ass at the wedding for a complete rundown of Jack Del Fuego’s permit situation. I thought I had it made. No way. “By the way, Leo. About the gift.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No more bun warmers.”

  “I never know what to buy,” I protested.

  “Get Rebecca to help you. Now that you two…”

  “We two what?”

  “You know.”

  “Who told you?” I asked.

  “Everybody knows.”

  “Everybody who?”

  “Maureen told me.”

  If my cousin Maureen knew Rebecca and I were moving in together, then it was a good bet the news had spread as far as mainland China. I gritted my teeth, renewed my promise to show up at the wedding, and broke the connection.

  The grating of a key in the lock pulled my head around. Hector and I stood openmouthed, staring at each other.

  “Oh…Leo…I taught jew was…” he began.

  “I was just…”

  Hector Gutierrez
was both the superintendent of my apartment building and a much valued friend. He managed a small smile. We stood among the dust and boxes, silenced by the mutual recognition of what would surely come next. I’m not good with silence. It makes me nervous, like there’s something going on all around me and yet I’m not a part of it. Silence is to be filled.

  As I opened my mouth to speak, Hector lost his grip on the great wad of keys in his hand. With a rush, the cable snapped them up to the little spring-loaded gizmo on his belt, taking whatever it was I thought I had to say with them. The quiet was broken only by the muted electronic wheezing of my ancient clock radio on the table.

  After a certain age, the realities of lives diverging can no longer be softened by even the best intentions. Our memories are filled with the hundreds of people who have walked through our lives, touched us in some way, and then seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. Time erodes our willingness to promise once again to keep in touch, and without willing it so, the Kleenex promises of youth give way to the carefully chosen holiday cards of adulthood.

  Hector got his shit together first.

  “Jew look like somebody shot your focking dog.”

  I looked around the place. It looked like a cautionary advertisement in favor of using professional movers.

  “I’ve been here a long time,” my voice said.

  Hector strode over and stood directly in front of me. His thick mustache was beginning to gray. He’d missed a spot on the left side of his chin when he’d shaved this morning. Most of the remaining bristles were white. He poked me in the chest.

  “Jew movin’ into a palacio dat you don’t got to pay for, wid a beautiful woooman who love you. What jew got to be sad about?”

  It sounded good when he said it, but somehow it failed to warm the cold spot at my center.

  “I’ve been alone a long time,” I said.

  “Oh yeah.” He spread his arms and looked around.

  “Must be tough to gibe up all dis.”

  Hector was right. The end of my noble isolation was no great loss. What had once been a statement had quietly become a question. What had begun, after my divorce, as an exercise in self-reliance had eroded into little more than a holding action against the inevitable, a pathetic rear-guard massacre of years, whose graves were marked by only the profusion of chips in the dishes and the buildup of paint on the familiar walls. He brought his hands down onto my shoulders, and then we embraced. When holding one another became too embarrassing, we stepped apart and put ourselves back together.

  “I guess maybe I’m not sure I deserve her,” I said.

  He grinned. “Dat’s easy, Leo. Jew shoulda tol me. I can help jew wid dat. Jew ready?”

  I nodded. He was still smiling.

  “Okay den, here eet is. Eet’s seemple. Jew right. Jew don’t deserve her. No focking way. Not even close. Mees Duvall eees a great lady, Leo. I doan gotta tell jew dat.” He tapped his temple. “Smart. A doktor.” He looked at me sadly and shrugged. “Jew…a private deek…” Thinking about my career seemed to rob him of words. “She way too good for jew ees what she ees. Jew just count your blessings ees what jew do.”

  “Gee, I feel better now.”

  He clapped me on the back and headed for the door.

  “Oh, doan worry, jew not de only one. Nobody really feel like dey deserve what dey got. Dey spend their whole fock-ing lives waiting for somebody to come and take eet all back, like eet was all a beeg mistake.”

  He stopped at the door and turned back my way.

  “Jew come round. We have a beer down at the Red Door.”

  “We’ll keep in touch,” I said.

  “Jew bet.”

  After he closed the door, I stood for a moment, listening to my own breath, as if expecting my door to open again. It didn’t.

  I snatched the phone from the table and punched in Rebecca’s number at the medical examiner’s office. No go. She’d left for the day.

  Both pager and cell phone set to voice mail. I left her the basics of where I was going to be and headed for the bedroom. With most of my clothes packed away, I was already living out of a suitcase and a shaving kit. All I had to do was zip them up.

  Much like salmon, professional drunks follow predictable evolutionary and migratory patterns. Early on, they stay close to the familiar gravel of their home waters. They limit themselves to cozy fern bars near the office. Someplace they can hit right after work for a bit of shoptalk and some serious stress relief, among cohorts who can be trusted to impound their car keys, call their wives, and stuff them into cabs. Nice places like that.

  Later, when both wives and car keys are things of the past; when the last of their loved ones has finally had enough and even the occasional truth is met with stony silence; when the next step involves sharing an apartment with a telephone pole and imagining a steady drizzle to be an integral part of any fine dining experience, then…then they’re ready for the Zoo.

  I stood in the doorway and waited for my eyes to adjust to the near darkness. An ornately carved stand-up bar, complete with brass foot rail, ran the full length of the room and down around the corner, where the only four stools in the joint looked back at the door.

  Stand-up bars keep a guy on his toes. It’s no trick for anybody to drink himself into a stupor with one cheek perched on a padded stool. Standing up was a whole other matter. A guy had to maintain some shred of dignity or risk falling among the cigar butts, the peanut shells, and the slick bronchial emissions composting underfoot.

  Bonnie, one of the owners, was behind the bar. I pointed at her and made a face. She pointed at her lower back and made her own face. Terry’s back was out again. Bonnie was stuck tending bar. I gave her a two-fingered salute and moved down the left-hand wall, past the six brown leatherette booths, toward the familiar noise at the back of the room. Three beer glasses and three empty shot glasses rested on the far end of the bar. The tops of the stools were covered with an array of coats, sweaters, vests, ponchos, and plastic bags. The Boys were playing snooker. As I stood at the corner of the bar and watched, it occurred to me that these old guys were, at this point in my life, my only tangible bequest from my father. Funny that they were the only ones who’d actually known him, and yet they were the only ones who never tried to trade on his name.

  George Paris saw me first. Sometime back in the early seventies, George’s banking career had fallen victim to both merger mania and his own unquenchable thirst for single malt scotch. His finely chiseled features and slicked-back white hair made him look like a ring announcer. If you didn’t look into his filigreed eyes or down at his mismatched shoes, you could easily mistake George for a functioning member of the global village.

  “The prodigal returns,” he said.

  I waved three fingers at Bonnie. “Wine for my friends.”

  The wine was, of course, purely metaphorical. I mean, they’d sure as hell drink wine if that’s all there was. Hell, they’d drink cleaning products if that’s all there was, but not if somebody else was buying. No, no. I checked my watch: eleven-fifteen. By now they were well into the shank of their drinking day.

  “Leo,” shouted Ralph Batista. He stumbled over my way, the butt of his pool cue clattering across the boards, threw an arm around my shoulder, and planted a wet kiss on my cheek. He smelled of diesel fuel and dry vomit. Ralph used to be a well-known port official. In his younger days, he mustered the longshoremen’s vote for the old man. The extra folds of skin on his face, combined with a paucity of functioning brain cells, gave him the benign countenance of a cabbage. Inner peace by default.

  “Hey, Harry, old boy. Look who’s here,” he shouted.

  Harold Green had sold men’s shoes at the Bon and been active in the Retailers Union. He used to be taller. He was one of those drunks who just keeps getting skinnier and skinnier, each lost ounce further emphasizing his baseball-sized Adam’s apple and cab-door ears.

  Harold was up on one foot, leaning over the table, sizing up a tricky t
hree-rail shot. When he heard the unmistakable sound of boilermakers hitting the bar, he left the cue rolling on the table and hustled over.

  “Howdy, kid,” he said as he squeezed by me.

  Other than an unquenchable thirst, these three had one other thing in common. Each had managed to hang in there long enough to have garnered a meager monthly stipend from his respective employer. Not a full pension, not enough to make it alone, but, with careful management, enough to collectively keep them in liquor and even, sometimes, out of the rain. Simplify. Simplify. That was their motto.

  With the precision of a drill team, the twisted trio downed their shots, slapped the glasses back on the bar, and chased it with the beer.

  “Ah,” said Ralph. “The pause that refreshes.”

  “Ambrosia,” confirmed Harold.

  George agreed. “Nectar of the gods,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Could you guys use a little work?” I asked.

  “You got something for us?” Ralph asked.

  “No, you idiot, he’s taking a survey,” snarled George.

  “One hundred bucks a day. Each,” I added.

  “No shit,” said Ralph.

  “We’re going to need a bunch more people too.”

  “How many?” George asked.

  “I figure nine more, plus you three.”

  “Well,” George said, “there’s Norman, for one.”

  “Where is Norman, anyway?”

  “He’s sleeping in.”

  Harold explained. “He got overserved last night at the Six-Eleven. Barkeep’s got no sense at all. Oughta call the city on him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Norman for four. Big Frank, Judy, Mary and Eariene, Billy Bob Fung, and Flounder for ten. Who else? I need two more. What about Waldo?”

  “In the can,” George said. “Got some twenty days left.”

  “Red Lopez?”

  “I can find Red,” said Ralph.

  “One more.”

  George started to open his mouth. I beat him to it.

  “Not the Speaker and not Slalom, so don’t even say it. When I tell you what we’re gonna be doing, you’ll understand why.”