“So have you gotten laid yet?”
“Please, Caitlin.”
“I’m curious.”
“Honey, we’ve been through this a thousand times.”
“Who’s ‘honey’? Is that me or one of your adoring fans?”
“I don’t have any adoring fans, Caitlin. If I did, I wouldn’t be signing autographs for a living.”
“Stop and think about that sentence for a minute, Joey. Tell me if you can find the logic in it, because I can’t.”
“Look, I made one mistake. Are you going to make me pay for it for the rest of my life?”
The truth is I’d made many such mistakes. Caitlin only knew about one of them, because the crazy girl thought she was in love with me. Somehow she got hold of my home phone number and started calling us day and night. She showed up at our door once in her goddamn Wonder Woman outfit, her face covered with greasepaint and glitter.
Caitlin only knew about the one affair. But I’d jumped into the sack with dozens of fangirls since I’d started going to these conventions. I don’t even know why. I was probably soothing my dwindling self-esteem. If I could find some work as an actor and start making some money to support my family, maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to sleep with every superhero in a Lycra skirt.
Most of the girls weren’t even pretty. They were geeks. Girls can be geeks, too, I’ve learned. Dressed in Batwoman outfits, wearing vampire dentures, covered from head to toe in purple makeup and glitter, sporting Star Trek uniforms. I even did it with a Klingon girl once. I took her up to my room and tried to maintain my erection for forty-five minutes while she removed her makeup. It was an elaborate concoction of latex and modeling wax that makeup artists call build-up. By the time she was ready to hop in bed I was as limp as a piece of overcooked rigatoni.
“I don’t want to talk about it now, Joey,” said Caitlin. “Why did you call?”
“I wanted to talk to Bianca.”
“She’s not here. She’s on a play date.”
I thought Caitlin was lying. When she first picked up the phone, I thought I heard Bianca giggling in the background. If Caitlin was keeping me from talking to my own daughter, I’d shit a brick. That would mark a new low in our relationship.
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where’s the play date?”
“With the daughter of a friend of mine from work. You don’t even know her.”
“Well, if I don’t even know her, do you think it’s a good idea to trust her with our daughter?”
“Who are you, Robert Young in Father Knows Best? I trust her. That’s all that counts. I trust her more than—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
This was how our conversations went nowadays. Bitter. Nasty. Mean-spirited. Which made me sad because neither one of us was like that. Caitlin used to be the most cheerful, charming, and generous person I’d ever met in my life. I wasn’t such a bad guy either. Not really. Now we talked to each other like two heavyweight boxers at a press conference before the weigh-in—hurling jibes, taunts, and threats at each other with reckless abandon. I couldn’t stop myself from picking fights with her. So I brought up the other subject I knew would make her mad—money.
“I’m making lots of cash at this convention.”
Actually, this was one of the worst attended Fan-Cons I’d ever been to. The Taj Mahal Hotel itself seemed like it was on the verge of bankruptcy—and the demand for my autograph was minimal.
“Must be nice.”
“What must be nice?”
“Making money by signing your name on a photograph. Getting your picture taken with some idiot in a zoot suit. It beats waitressing by a long shot.”
“I’ve told you that you can give up that waitressing job whenever you want.”
“I thank you for that, Joey, I really do. But I have a weakness for food, clothing, and shelter. So does your five-year-old daughter. That’s why I have to keep doing it.”
“I can get a regular job to help out.”
“Oh, dear Lord,” she sighed. “I can’t talk about this right now. Not on the telephone. Thanks for calling collect, by the way. Silly me, I thought collect calls had gone out of style. I bet you’re in a phone booth,” she said with a nasty chuckle. “You’ve found the last working phone booth in America and used it to call me collect.”
Just then I saw Tony Rosetti walk by the bank of phone booths. He didn’t see me, thank God. He walked like a lion in the noonday sun. I felt the hair on the back of my neck and on my forearms stand up. What was it about this guy that was so scary? I made a mental note to walk in the opposite direction when I got off the phone.
“Joey, are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, I got distracted.”
“Hot-looking chick in a Wookie suit?”
“Are you sure Bianca isn’t there, Caitlin? I’d really like to talk to her.”
“Am I sure? Gee, let me see. I lose track of her all the time. Maybe she’s in Queens betting the exacta on the fifth at Aqueduct. That’s where she was the last time I lost her.”
“I’ve got to go. I’m meeting someone for lunch.”
“Princess Leia?”
“No, as a matter of fact, it’s Jeremiah Pennington.”
“Jerry’s there?”
I heard a smile in her voice for the first time since the call began. Just like me, just like everybody else in the world, she adored Jerry. We’d had him over to our tiny apartment for dinner several times when he was still living in New York. The two of them got along like a house on fire. They talked about the theater, Shakespeare, acting, even politics. They agreed on some things, disagreed on others. But they seemed to love talking to each other. He had that effect on people.
“I thought Jerry only went to the big conventions, like the one in San Diego. What’s that called again?”
“Comic-Con. I always thought so, too. But he came to this one. Big mistake on his part. The attendance is lousy.”
“I thought you said you were making good money.”
“Look, Caitlin, I’ve got to run. I’ll call again when Bianca gets back from the racetrack.” I hoped for a laugh, but none came. So I said, “Nice talking to you.”
“It’s been lovely talking to you, too, Joey. Goodbye.”
I hung up the phone and poked my head outside the phone booth to look for Rosetti.
Damn! He stood thirty feet away from me and stared in my direction. When our eyes met, he gave me a cold smile and walked toward me.
I bolted in the opposite direction.
“Mr. Volpe, I want to talk to you,” he shouted.
I ignored him and picked up my pace. For some reason, I noticed that he’d pronounced my name correctly. Out of a thousand people I meet, most of them call me “Volpee.” “It’s ‘Volpay,”’ I correct them. Five minutes later, they’re calling me Volpee again. It’s a subtle distinction for an American to hear, I guess. In fact, Rosetti’s correct pronunciation tempted me to stop and talk to him.
But I wasn’t too tempted.
“Mr. Volpe. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.”
I scurried toward the hotel coffee shop where, I hoped, Jerry Pennington would be waiting for me to arrive. I knew Jerry would have some security with him. Not an armed guard or anything. Just some nerdy volunteer assigned to make sure nobody stopped him to ask for an autograph without paying for it.
“Mr. Volpe. Joey. Please. I only need five minutes.”
Joey? We were on a first-name basis?
I kept walking.