“Holy shit! Close that door,” I say.
Zeb obliges, swiping the door with his boot. His arms are full of cocktail glasses and there’s a bottle of Jameson sticking out his jacket pocket.
He plonks his booty on my desk, squints at me and says: “Fuck me, stage two. We better get some more booze into you, pal. I don’t want to spend my night in here with a depressed Catholic. I’d rather take my chances out there with the ass bandits.”
I snort. “Jason and Marco have both each other and standards, so I think your skinny ass is safe from banditry.”
I’m not sure if banditry is even a word, but for a man with the amount of alcohol in him that I have, that was not a bad sentence.
Zeb settles into the guest seat and downs three shots in quick succession.
“I gotta hand it to you,” he says. “This took balls, literally, but you pulled it off. I should reach around the desk and give you a shake.”
Zeb then collapses in a sneezy fit of giggles like he’s made several good jokes. I do not know what in the bejaysus is going on.
“Zeb, are you mocking me? Am I the butt of some joke?”
More giggles. Zeb actually sneezes into a shot, then drinks it anyway.
“Butt? Yeah, you’re the butt all right.”
I am too emotionally delicate for this crap.
“Zebulon. I’m bloody drunk, okay? Your stupid labyrinths are too bendy for me.”
Zeb loves that one too. “Bendy? Dude, we all gotta learn to bend.”
Okay. He’s baiting me. Leading me toward that holy-grail moment when I lose my cool and turn into a big lumbering bear. Well, it ain’t gonna happen.
Compose yourself, soldier. Be the bigger man.
With this in mind I take a handgun from the drawer and place it on the desk.
“Zeb. I am feeling delicate and not in the mood for your cryptic shit. Spell it out.”
“What? You’re gonna shoot me?”
I look him in the eye. “Probably not, but this has been a tough week for me. I’ve been kidnapped for a snuff movie. Tortured by cops. Shot at by hoodlums and I lost my girl. So, tell me, what’s with all the innuendo?”
I see a new expression on Zeb’s face. I realize that the expression is pity. It doesn’t suit him and won’t last long.
“I can’t just tell you, man. That’s not how I roll.”
“But?” I prompt.
Zeb grins and his teeth have a greenish tinge from the drink. “I can give you hints.”
I sigh. “Right. Hints. Make ’em obvious, though. My brain functions are compromised.”
Zeb pulls a sheet of paper from his Armani jacket.
“The new cocktail list.”
“Whatever.”
“Did you read it?”
“No. J gave me a One-Eyed Serpent.”
“Classic,” says Zeb, chuckling. “Lemme list a couple more.”
“Knock yourself out. Before I do it for you.”
“There’s the Manjoos.”
“Yeah, I think that one has mango in it.”
“Really? What d’you reckon the Twinkletown is made of?”
I know that one. “That has a lit sparkler. Looks pretty cool.”
Zeb nods. “Cool as all fuck, like the new color scheme.”
I’m getting closer. “Yellow and green.”
Zeb is vibrating with pleasure. The payoff must be huge. “Yeah, yellow and green, or to put it another way. Green and yellow. Which is what it says over the door now.”
This hangs in the air for a minute.
Green and yellow. Green and . . .
The penny drops with a deafening clang.
I get it. Holy reach-around.
“It’s a . . .”
Zeb doesn’t let me say it. “It’s a gay bar. You own a gay bar, dude.”
“All those guys out there?”
“Gay as game shows, brother. What are you? Blind?”
I feel blind. Blind and stupid.
“I know you’re hoping for the big meltdown, Zebadora, but I ain’t angry.”
Zeb’s eyebrows shoot up. “Angry? Are you kidding me? Jason’s a fucking genius. These guys are not just gay, they’re super-gay. Statistically the biggest spenders on the planet. Super-gay is a tough market to crack, but if you can tap into it, it’s a frikkin’ gold mine.”
“A gold mine?”
“You betcha. These guys have got fat wallets and they ain’t shy about opening them. Super-gays will pay twenty bucks for any cocktail with a dirty name. Tomorrow night, I’m parking a Botox mobile outside.”
I am feeling a little stunned so I revert to my bouncer habit of repeating what’s been said to buy myself a little time.
“You’re parking a Botox mobile outside. You have a Botox mobile?”
Zeb is delighted at how drunk and slow I am. Usually by the time I’m in this condition, he’s having his stomach pumped in the ER.
“Yeah, I got a Botox mobile. It’s on the roof beside my Transformer, you shmendrik.”
Aha! That’s total crap.
“You don’t have a Transformer,” I say. “They’re just in the movies.”
“No shit, McSherlock,” says Zeb, then downs a shot that appears to have an eyeball floating in it. He shudders as the alcohol hits his stomach.
“Was that supposed to represent an eyeball?” I ask.
Zeb chews and swallows. “The drink is called a Ball Buster, so what do you think?”
The door opens and in walks Carmine, and before I know what’s going on there’s a gun in my hand and it’s pointed at his face.
“Hey,” says Carmine, raising his hands. “What the hell, man?”
Carmine sounds different: more California, less New York. Maybe it’s the stress.
“This is the guy,” I tell Zeb. “This is the prince who stole Sofia from me.”
Zeb folds his arms and leans back to watch the show. “Well, I guess you better shoot him.”
Carmine kicks the leg of Zeb’s chair. “Screw you, Zeb. That ain’t funny.”
It takes a second for these words to penetrate the Jell-O coating my brain, then I say:
“You guys know each other? I guess I better shoot both of you then.”
Zeb is not in the least worried. I think I have been overplaying the threatening to shoot him card of late.
“Whatever, Dan. Just pay the man his money.”
“Yeah, pay me my money,” says Carmine. “I was waiting outside that apartment for hours, man.”
Hold it a minute. What is going on here?
“Pay you? Pay him? For what?”
Zeb gets that mischievous look in his eyes that tells me he’s gonna drag this out until I explode. Like I said, pushing my buttons is Zeb’s thing.
“Come on, Danny boy,” he says. “You’re a smart Paddy. Use your brain.”
Zeb miscalculates my tolerance levels and reaches across the desk to tap my forehead. I might have tolerated this had I not once been tapped in much the same way by a guy who went on to do his utmost to make me dead. So maybe I associate one tapper with another, and perhaps I’ve had a few too many super-gay shots to drink, and so it’s possible that I overreact a little.
I grab him by the wrist and yank him bodily across the desk. Zeb laughs because he knows that deep down I am a big softy, so I smack him in the rice-pudding cheek just enough to smart.
“Hey, fuck you, Danny. After all I’ve done for you.”
Sure. After all Zeb’s done for me I should snap his spine across my knee like the spear of a vanquished enemy. But Zeb has me pegged and knows that he’s in no real danger. All Carmine knows about me is what Sofia told him, which I would be willing to bet is sweet shag-all.
So I twist Zeb’s scrawny arm up around his back and frog-march him out of my office. Too late my little pal realizes what’s going on and shouts over his shoulder.
“Don’t say nothing. He’s just a p—”
The rest of the p word is truncated by the slam and lo
ck of the office door. I imagine the p word was not pal or prince.
Carmine stands in the corner all clenched fists and puffed chest.
“What the hell is going on here? I just want my money.”
I sit at my chair and begin casually removing bullets from my revolver. “Here’s the deal, Carmine. Zeb likes to string things out. Delay gratification as much as possible. Give me a goddamn migraine with all his bullshit. I ain’t got time for that now.” I leave a single bullet in the cylinder, snap it shut with a flick of my wrist and spin it a few times. “So what we’re gonna do is play a little game I picked up in Nam.”
Carmine tries to sneer but his wobbling moustache gives him away. “There ain’t no such place as ‘Nam.’”
Surely he can’t be for real. Then again some people do think Nam was invented for the movies—that it isn’t a real country and the war never happened. In fact surveys have shown that more people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five believe in Narnia than Vietnam.
“It’s real, all right. This is as real as it gets.” I point the gun at him. “I am drunk and maudlin so tell me what this is all about.”
It takes him about half a second to think fuck Zeb and then he spills his guts so fast the words are bumping into each other.
“I ain’t no Carmine. I go to acting class with Zeb; when he found out about the 911 call, he asked me to impersonate the guy. Just wait outside the bitch’s place until the lady cop showed, then do my thing.”
I feel such a tool. How could I ever have believed in Carmine’s convenient materialization? The odds against Sofia’s actual husband turning up after twenty years, at the exact moment his abandoned wife is about to be dragged off to prison must be immeasurable. Yet, I swallowed the whole ball of lies without a murmur.
“What about the whole prison bit?”
“That’s all true,” admits non-Carmine. “The secret of acting is to stick as close to the truth as possible.”
“So you were locked up in Texas?”
“Yeah. Punked too. My painful and humiliating honesty sold it to the cop. I exposed myself, metaphorically.”
I groan. This goddamn country. Everyone reads Stanislavski.
“So Zeb offers you . . .”
“A grand.”
“A grand to impersonate Sofia’s husband?”
“That’s it, man. I doctored my release papers and impersonated the shit out of that husband.”
He did. I fell for it, so did Ronnie.
“What about Sofia?”
Non-Carmine smiles proudly and feck me if there isn’t a tear in his eye. “She swallowed it totally. Imagine that. Al Pacino, fuck that guy. They should be giving me his Oscar.”
I shouldn’t hate this fool so much but I do. I guess he’s become Carmine incarnate for me and it’s difficult to see him as anything else.
“So? What did you do? You took advantage of Sofia? Is that it, method man?”
“I didn’t take no advantages,” says the guy, but his rat’s eyes flick up and down like he’s looking for a bolt hole and I know he ain’t spilling the full beans.
“You ever see The Deer Hunter? I bet you did. A method man like you would eat that shit up.”
“Yeah, I seen it,” says non-Carmine, and there are lines of sweat lodged in his forehead.
I cock the revolver. “Then you know what happens next.”
That did it. “I tried to put the pipe to her. She’s pretty fine for an old dame but she kept calling me Dan.”
I figure a lowlife like this could live with being called Dan if it meant lying down with Sofia.
“And?”
“And she said my thing was smaller than she remembered. Got into my head. Undermined my confidence in the whole performance. Also I remembered how Zeb said you’d tear me limb from limb me if I interfered with the old lady and that put me right off.”
Old lady? Sofia was not yet forty. I always have some crazy on tap and I let a little shine out through my eyes then.
“So you left her? Again.”
“Hey, hey, wait a minute, man. I ain’t Carmine. I never left that lady before.”
I consider pulling the trigger a few times to teach this guy a lesson, but for what? All he did was keep Sofia out of prison. So I march him to the fire door and boot him into the alley.
“Hey, what the hell?” he objects and I know I’m on shaky ground morally seeing as this guy did me a solid, but he threw a few shapes at Sofia so I can’t bring myself to actually give him the whole thousand, so I toss him three hundred and eighty, which is what I have in my wallet. Let him harass Zeb for the rest. I’d love to see him method act six hundred and change out of Zeb’s wallet.
It kills me to say it but: “I suppose I should thank you. Your performance was so real, so primal that I can’t stop thinking how I hate you and wish you were dead.”
Non-Carmine looks like he might cry. “Thanks, man. That’s quite a compliment.”
But compliments only get you so far. “So where’s the rest of my fee?”
“Talk to Zeb,” I tell him.” He’ll sort you out.”
I don’t know whether the guy is good with this suggestion or not, because I slam the door on him.
Now I gotta let Zeb back in and he’s gonna be full to the eyeballs with smugness, asking for apologies and canonizing himself for this good turn he’s done me. I hate Zeb in self-satisfied mode. Come to think of it, I haven’t been exactly falling over myself to consort with Zebulon Kronski in any of his humors lately.
I need to find a better class of amigo.
I open the office door and there the little bastard is, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, waiting for his apology.
“You got something to say to me, Dan?”
I might as well get it over with. “Okay. I’m sorry, all right?”
“Really? What are you sorry for?”
He’s like a Jewish Catholic priest, determined to prolong my act of contrition.
“I’m sorry for manhandling your divine person when all you did was look out for Sofia.”
Zeb reads my body language and rightly interprets the tremors in my shoulders as repressed violence.
“I accept your apology,” he says and takes the seat nearest the booze. “I assume you ejected Rafe?”
Rafe? Fuck me.
I nod and help myself to one of Zeb’s cocktails.
“And you paid him, right?”
“Of course. A thousand in fifties. Money well spent.”
Zeb squints suspiciously at me but I distract him by stealing another one of his drinks.
“Hey, hands off, Daniel. Get your own. Just call Marco and have him send in a tray.”
I switch the subject again, moving Zeb two topics away from Rafe’s pay packet.
“How did you know about the 911?”
“Are you kidding me? I shoot up both the switchboard girls and three of the patrolmen. I got ears all over that department.”
This is information I will not be passing on Ronelle. It’s always good to have an inside track in Police Plaza.
“And you couldn’t just tell me?”
Zeb smiles sadly at how little I know him. “Straightforward-like, that’s not how the Zeb-man rolls.”
There are at least three things in that sentence that make me want to punch the Zeb-man in his smiling face.
The music from outside jumps a few notches and I realize I might have to rethink my living quarters. Eventually this beat beat beat crap would get to me. Whatever happened to melody? Or singers who don’t name-check themselves every four bars?
Jason barges in, his face flushed, left hand pumping the air in time to the music.
Zeb shoots him with two finger guns.
“Who’s a goddam fairy genius?” he asks.
Jason points two index fingers at his own head. “This guy, right here.”
I have to give it to him. “You did it, J. This place is buzzing.”
“And you ain’t angry?”
&n
bsp; I go for blasé. “Nah. Why would I be angry?”
“Lotta gays out there. Not just gays, super-gays.”
“That’s a niche market,” I say, regurgitating Zeb’s lecture. “A gold mine if you can get in there.”
Jason rushes around the desk and hugs me. “I knew you’d be cool, partner. Some people freak out, but not you. Danny boy. My man.”
“I am totally cool,” I say, feeling Jason’s bicep flatten my right ear. “But those guys know I’m straight, right?”
Jason releases my head and punches my shoulder, genuinely of the opinion that I’m kidding. “Oh, I think they know you’re straight, Mr. Banana Republic. And anyways, it’s a casino not the prison showers. Though we might do that for theme night.”
“Theme night?”
“I got a million ideas, Dan. People are gonna cross the river for this place. We’re gonna have a line around the block.”
It’s good I suppose. Being the boss of a thriving business. Making bank. But I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for the time when I was just a bouncer living underneath a crazy woman. I guess it is in my nature to never be satisfied. To seek out the flaws in every situation.
Maybe Sofia did put a full magazine into Carmine.
See what I mean?
The blood drains from my face and I feel like I have somehow phase-shifted into a dream state. I thought I was winding down, and my girl’s a murderess. Again.
“So, you gonna come out and listen to my speech, partner?” Jason asks, shifting on his feet, eager to get back out on the floor.
“’Course I am. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I just need a little Dutch courage.”
I’m gonna have one more drink, then maybe sing a song. One song and then I’ll call Sofia, if I can remember the code.
Zeb magnanimously sweeps a hand over his collection of cocktails, offering me my pick, which is very unlike him. I bet it has just occurred to the Zeb-man that he could do worse than be made a partner in my new super-gay club.
I choose a Ball Buster, complete with floating pickled onion testicle.
Seems appropriate.
EPILOGUE
IT’S A WEEK SINCE THE RONELLE TRIED TO ARREST SOFIA AND my life has gone back to quasi-normal, in that I am nominally seeing my alleged girlfriend for what approximates cozy evenings watching foreign fiction on TV.