Some bozos on TV are telling the viewers how to make your first million selling real estate from your own home. Hawk inflates a couple of the heart-shaped Earth Day balloons and lets one out the window, then another; unkinking from the long ride. Right, if they were making millions these humanitarians would tell anyone how.
Hawk had called ahead when they gassed up and drank slushies outside D.C., hoping to arrange an evening with Carla and Zoey, maybe catch a matinee of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? No one answers now, and there’s no message on his machine, so he leaves a fresh message and fixes canned ravioli, panfried with one orange habañere. Then catches the last segment of a Discovery Channel special on our Cro-Magnon ancestors starting fire with sticks. Carla’s always got a paperback in her jeans about spiritual awareness and primitive times because she says she needs to be in touch with stuff that’s more real and primal. Hawk thinks you don’t have to go looking for primitivity: it rings at your door.
Hawk flips the channels: QVC gold-plated silverware; Barbara Bush looking like George Washington in drag; Jessica Hahn interviewed after negotiating to sell her account of being degraded by Jim Baker; a party official citing Spiro T. Agnew in calling the media “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism”; Fawn Hall refusing to pose for Playboy; Dukakis a few lengths ahead at the ⅝ pole, entering the auditorium to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America.” Fields of placards sway, brass bands pump, balloons drift across the American seal, and large Styrofoam index fingers point toward the small man, stiff and trim on the podium, who drones on about how he’d said all along that character would elect the next president of the United States of America in 1988. And he smiles to the delegates, their sea of round faces chips in the presidential pot, his pillhead wife at his side waving to the people.
Hawk heads for the Crime Scene, a bar you enter through streamers of yellow crime tape saying Crime Scene Do Not Cross. He doesn’t have to order here because John the bartender knows his pleasure and pours him a freebie every second round and Hawk tips him the cost of the drinks. Hawk scratches the bar when he’s ready, like taking a hit at blackjack, and John tells him with his eyes when he’s had enough. In every public space you’re somebody, nobody, or a guy at the edges who people nod to and shake hands with until they become sure of which one you are.
From the bar Hawk phones Carla again. Maybe she can meet the gang at Cannoli’s to celebrate Atlanta and Jep’s birthday.
“Hawk,” she answers sleepily. “You back in town?”
“I missed you,” he says.
Pause.
“Hey, baby, you free tonight? Watcha wearing?”
“Blankets. I worked all night and half the day and tomorrow this deal we’ve been waiting on came through. You know Carlos, ‘No cash, no sign, baby.’ And I’m fighting a cold.”
“I hope you win. Drink chicken soup and call Señor Hawk in the morning.”
Was it a cold or coldness in her voice? Had there been any gladness to hear from him? He can’t read her voice any more than he could read her expression when she said she’d think about the apartment. No wonder he keeps losing at Texas Hold ’Em.
He’d wanted to tell her how he cleared more than five grand over the week. What’s the point of good fortune if he doesn’t have someone besides Armand, Phil the Pot, and Slavic dice-degenerates to share it with? Only then he might have to explain why he had to give it right back, and about his fix, his debts, which he’s held to his chest, doubting she’s ready to take the bad with whatever sweetness she sees in him.
John brings another JD and chaser. Hawk sees a regular, looking better, almost cured, and thinks it’s a hopeful sign. Only when Hawk taps the man’s shoulder the guy whirls with a ferocious look. On the other side a white-haired woman with a baby carriage orders a pint. Hawk thinks the carriage is carrying her things but then a baby cries from inside. Good for Carla that the work’s coming through. Hawk feels strong, like Bullwinkle. Down to a half of Doc’s pills the last two days, his foot aching less, no drink to speak of all week, and not a drop of gamble.
The itch for action has faded enough to hold off and inspect. And what comes into view are late-lates when, throat sandpapery and forehead fevered, the unmerciful cold cards come charging, driving him cleaned out and busted and shocked and twitchy and nose wide open to the next room, where electric lights cackle over a few old gin players slanting against the wall with their mouths open. Phil the Pot taps the ash off his cigar, looks at him like Hawk’s a fighter who’s had enough and better save a few marbles for another day and says, “Go home. Enough is enough. You’ll thank me later.” And Phil stares from behind his thermos of Bloody Mary and Racing Form and little black book. Phil from Philadelphia, the tightest Hold ’Em player in the joint, running his own offtrack betting, sitting by the pay phone like he owned it, taking bets and paying out ten cents higher than the OTB, using the backs of OTB forms as personal stationery.
“Phil, I can get ’em.”
“You’re running cold, kid, and late at night it gets cooler.”
Muchos gracias, Philly.
Hawk hits his bruised knuckles against each other a few times, flakes a dry scab.
He shouldn’t play tonight. If he starts, it’ll suddenly be late and he won’t sleep except a few minutes on the subway downtown and miss his stop and wake in Chinatown. He should get out early, hang some Disney and convention T-shirts and July Fourth balloons from the cart.
Close to Cannoli’s, Hawk looks in the window of a leather goods store, catches sight of a sweet briefcase. He thinks of Jep always walking around with his student papers in a plastic bag. If he were a teacher and had papers to carry, maybe he’d like this kind of thing. Once inside he doesn’t want to buy cheap so he wanders into the two-hundred-dollar neighborhood, inhaling the smell of fresh leather while the saleswoman tails him.
Hawk gets to Cannoli’s late and lit. The bar is made of blue glass with lights beneath. When Mario brings a shot of Cuervo, Hawk downs it and flaps his arms like Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider and makes a sound like the brakes on an 18-wheeler and most of the bar cracks up. He takes out a stash of lottery tickets—the kind with lemons you can scratch right there—and tosses some to Jep; Mario; Mikey; Jep’s wife Sarah; and her friend Sue, saying “sweets,” like Laszlo sprinkling chips.
Next to him a couple argues about whether France is north or south of Spain and concludes it doesn’t matter unless you’re in a hurry. Jep smiles, his head so clogged with facts you fear for his mind. He qualified for Jeopardy but flunked the personality test.
Now he claws at his back.
“I studied like crazy for that tryout,” Jep says. “I used to memorize the World Book during commercials. I read that Hershel Walker did push-ups during commercials, so I felt like we’d bonded. I’d think of him doing push-ups while I memorized useless facts.”
Jep scrapes by. He got several master’s degrees but shelved his dissertation in American history a couple of years back when he got steady adjunct work at two community colleges. He says his classes are so dead he should practice his lectures at Potter’s Field. When he’s not teaching he works for Sammy and Norman testing their products on the street—T-shirts, coffee mugs, visors—as long as they’re for causes he believes in, which means that on any given issue he only makes half the money he might.
Sarah has her hair done straight up in a bun and wound around in an African batik headdress. Jep pays for their drinks and a banana split with his roll, pulling the wad out like a bull’s-eye.
“Since when do teachers have money?” Susan says.
“They sold buttons at the Democratic convention and it was a Georgia peach,” Sarah says.
“Like street vendors? Me, I couldn’t sell. I’d be nervous if I had a cake in a cake show. I wouldn’t be able to stand it if people didn’t buy from me.”
“I can’t stand it either,” Hawk says.
“Hawk, you’re going to the Republican convention too, right?” Sarah says. “Not that there’s much difference between the two. Does either of them have a viewpoint? I mean, are there any ideas at all in this campaign?”
“According to the The American Voter,” Jep says, “only 2 percent of American voters have any ideological position. You catch Dukakis trying to convince the press that he’s not a liberal? It’s a personality derby.”
“Get me a mint julep,” Hawk says.
“Dukakis a liberal?” Sarah says, practically choking on the banana split. “Give me a break. Just because he used to dress like he was in the Mod Squad doesn’t make him a liberal. He’s ethnic preppy.”
“The Republicans win either way,” Sue says. “As the good Dr. Thompson wrote in the Voice the other day, it’s ‘the meanest yuppie who ever lived against a robotic Greek.’ After the election the homeless kids can say, ‘Hooray, my capital gains taxes are safe,’ the people in soup kitchens can say, ‘Yippee, my family values are safe.’”
“Yo Jep,” Hawk says, remembering the bag with the leather briefcase. “I got you something to hold your things in. It’s made of genuine newspaper.”