Two days passed, but there was no word from Bobby Goldstein. He didn’t come begging to do the show.
“That son of a bitch,” Buggy yelled, flipping over his dining table and smashing his collection of bulldog-themed coffee mugs. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to rip off his scrawny legs and beat him to death with them.”
Buggy looked like a mess. He wore a mustard-stained wife-beater shirt beneath a pair of purple suspenders. His hair was dreadlocked with sweat. He hadn’t bathed in days. When he saw what he’d done to his coffee mug collection, he smashed it further with his size twenty shoes.
“Erff…,” Mittens said, upset over the crashing sounds that brought him out of his fourth afternoon nap.
Buggy turned to the two clowns sitting on the couch across from him. They were the only two men he had left who weren’t behind bars at the moment—Winky Gagliano and Snuffy Sparkles. And they were the least capable of all his men. Snuffy ran the smallest, dingiest, least-attended comedy club in Bozo territory and Winky was the man responsible for keeping street comedians from slinging jokes in their territory—which he was lousy at. Both of them had crews of three men each, who were even bigger fuckups than they were.
Buggy turned to Winky—an ex-boxer with a crooked green nose and a winking tic. “I want you to go see Bobby Goldstein. He’s doing this show whether he likes it or not. Use force if you have to. Show him we mean business.”
“You got it, skipper,” Winky said, punching his knuckles together.
“But don’t rough him up too much. He’s got a show to do.”
“Whatever you say.”
As Winky took the address and left the apartment, Buggy wondered if he was doing the right thing sending that clown after the comedian. Winky was trigger-happy and short-tempered. He liked roughing people up and he liked whacking them even more. Although he was only a lightweight during his boxing days and was mostly just used as a clown-shaped punching bag for training real boxers, he had an unrelenting passion for violence. It was possible that Goldstein would find himself with a bullet in his head if he resisted too much.
Buggy shouted, “And whatever you do, don’t kill him.”
But Winky was already gone.
Then it was just Buggy and Snuffy Sparkles. Snuffy was a sniveling weasel of a clown. Nobody liked the guy. How the joker ever got made, Buggy had no idea. They called him Snuffy because he sniffled all the time. He was allergic to pretty much all pollen, all animal dander, and all sorts of food products. It seemed almost impossible for a person to be allergic to so much. Buggy figured most of it had to be psychological.
“Can you open a window or something?” Snuffy asked, holding a red-and-blue-checkered handkerchief over his droopy nose. “The dog hair is killing me.”
Buggy sneered at the runt. “No, I’m not fucking opening a window. It’s raining out there. Mittens doesn’t like the draft.”
“Erfff…,” Mittens said in agreement, licking his nose.
“But I seriously can’t handle it, Buggy,” Snuffy said. “I have a serious condition. I could be hospitalized.”
“Deal with it,” Buggy said.
Snuffy sneezed glitter across the coffee table and into Mittens’s face. The bulldog didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re going to be responsible for promoting this thing,” Buggy said. “I know promotion isn’t your strong suit. If it was, you’d be able to get more than three people into your lousy club each night. But I don’t have anyone else. You’re going to have to promote this event and you’re going to fill the venue. Don’t screw it up.” The capo gave the clown an address book. “Take this. It’s a list of my regular clients. Those are the most important people to promote this event to. If we get them interested, word will spread. After that, get your crew to spread the word on the street. You’ve got the most important job. If you fuck it up you’re dead. You hear me?”
Snuffy nodded and sneezed more glitter into the air.
Buggy really wished he had somebody else to do Snuffy’s job. Anybody else.