CHAPTER 4

Around the same time Philyaw was being processed into the jail at Hermosa Beach and Sussman was opening the closet to a knife-wielding intruder, newly released convict Bento was miles away, ambling through the harbor district seeking his first beer in four years. He’d already passed a few bars sprinkled among the pawnshops, liquor stores and boarded-up storefronts. He finally settled on a place called Daphne’s that looked just as tired and gray as the others but with more customers. Four men in dirt-caked construction boots stood outside the entrance smoking cigarettes and talking football. They seemed unaware that if they chose they could head up to Big Bear to watch shooting stars and still make it to work in the morning. Bento had decided while he was in prison that he’d try to remind himself of such possibilities so he could drink even deeper of freedom.

Inside, he smelled twenty years of beer and burgers. It was crowded and noisy, not particularly clean. A drinking bar, late afternoon, with a few TVs scattered around to give solitary drinkers something to look at, like bright plastic dinguses stretched above an infant’s crib. Lots of middle-aged customers with divorces and fading tattoos peeking out of their clothes. He found himself a stool and learned too late that a pot-bellied loudmouth next to him thought everything was hilarious. About forty working-stiff keys dangled from a ring in his belt. “Working hard?” he asked an acquaintance strolling past. The acquaintance smiled and kept moving, but the punch line came anyway: “Or hardly working?” And the man with the forty keys, though bereft of any defined audience, broke into a god-awful ear-splitting laugh. It was a recurring scenario. The man would say something corny and then find himself hysterically funny. But the laugh was eerily devoid of happiness. It was more like a plea for happiness that Bento guessed would remain beyond his reach. A man who had nothing to say but said it anyway.

Heading straight to an unfamiliar neighborhood was a calculated decision. Had Bento gone back to the same old streets in Anaheim they’d contain the same old friends and not a few enemies, all a danger to his freedom. Also, in some storybook corner of his mind he imagined that here along the harbor he’d slide into just the right bar stool at just the right time to strike up a conversation with just the right guy who’d send him to the secret place where they handed out longshoremen’s union cards—the next best thing to winning Powerball. Bento had also dreamed of becoming a firefighter, a merchant marine officer, and the Angels’ first baseman. Some people really held these positions. They existed. But one by one they’d slipped away from him.

Back in Lancaster lots of cons had warned him to stay out of joints like this. Back there if you got into a beef and fought it out you went to the hole. But out here prosecutors might wave twenty-five to life in your face for doing the exact same thing. You didn’t have to kill anyone. You didn’t even have to hurt anyone as long as the offense was considered “serious.” And authorities seemed to think everything was serious. They were like toddlers punching shiny buttons that could melt down a man’s life minute by minute, year after year. Ten years, twenty, twenty-five to life. The years tripped off the tongues of prosecutors, judges and court-appointed lawyers who nodded and went home to dinner.

Twenty-five to lifers rarely made it out. Parole boards figured they’d done so much time they could no longer function out here and would just commit more crimes. So for doing so much time they got punished with more time, with all their time. Which is why, if it came down to it, Bento would let anyone in here swipe his currency off the bar and spit in his eye. What mattered was staying out in the world. And maybe in time the world would feel freer to him than it did now.

He was about to slip off the stool when the loudmouth with the forty keys left to join acquaintances in a booth. A young woman carrying a big purse and a small dish of pizza quickly swooped in from some heavenly place and took his place. Bento had seen a flash of squeaky-clean brown hair, shoulder length. He was too intimidated to make a more thorough inspection. Moments later she was cheerfully talking to him about the Dodgers playing on the screen in front of him. You could tell she felt a touch of trepidation but decided to break the ice anyway.

“We went last week and I’ve got this friend who works at the stadium? He calls me on my cell phone and finds out where we’re sitting. He goes, ‘Let me get you some real seats,’ and he comes over and like gives us these tickets. So we read the numbers and we’re walking closer and closer to the field, and I’m like, I don’t believe this. Finally we end up right behind first base. I mean like I can fucken see the players’ faces.” Fucken. By pronouncing the word she’d already shared an intimacy that implied Bento was just as cool as she was.

Trying to look casual, he turned and made a more thorough appraisal. And decided she must be an actress. Regular people didn’t look like that. The exquisite chin and cheek-bones, flawless skin, all of it. But what would an actress be doing in this dump? Maybe she was like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, coming home to visit her longshoreman father whose labors had stretched one arm longer than the other. Well, actress or not, she was radiant, with an expressive face that smiled easily. She wore one of those really daring blouses that kept no cleavage secrets, and she owned lovely, round, scarily flawless, medium-sized breasts, the kind depicted in magazine illustrations but never encountered in real life. At one point she even patted them with her palm to make a conversational point, freely drawing attention to their tactile availability. She was a knockout you could talk to. Then he tried talking to her. “You were in movie star territory,” he blurted out, a nifty observation about her stadium experience, he thought. Except at that point he had nothing more to say, not even anything lame. He searched his mind frantically and found only blank cartridges.

Bento ordered another beer, too paralyzed to even offer her one. They both sat there for several lifetimes that must have lasted two minutes. She was clearly expecting him to keep the conversation going, and each lost moment made everything worse, but his mind and tongue were frozen. At the same time he seemed to be exhaling some kind of deadening agent that filled the space around him with contagious discomfort. He was fresh out of anything sprightly, witty, or even mildly interesting to say. Finally a little guy on the other side of her wearing an aloha shirt and a baseball cap pointed in the wrong direction, said, “Man, isn’t this the worst pizza you ever tasted?” Yes, there it was, unfinished in front of her. Something to talk about.

“Stink-adocious,” she said.

A darling remark, but the little poacher didn’t even pause to chuckle. “Ever been to Gino’s up near Chinatown?” he asked her. Maybe Marshall McLuhan was right. What mattered was not what you said, but how you said it. The two of them began chirping like happy pigeons, all loose and free of dense, ridiculous Bento. The pizza discussion, his last small window of a conversational opportunity, closed forever as they began trading personal information. It was heartbreaking.

Bento slunk off with no good-byes. Only when he reached the street did he realize he’d left at least twelve dollars on the bar. His $200 in release money was going fast. That night he was too disgusted with himself to masturbate. Not even in his imagination was he worthy of her.