The Atlantics, one of my all-time favorite local bands, is already blasting their hit “Lonelyhearts” inside my head when Martine Andino steps out of the Loews holding a black guitar case, tips the doorman, and folds himself into a cab.
I see fear and despair
Written all over your face
But it’s no disgrace
A life that’s lived alone
Andino had changed into a suit and from the corner I catch a glimpse of what his turtleneck had concealed, a colorful explosion of inky flames sprouting from the open collar of his shirt and running up his neck. I toss the remains of my lukewarm coffee and follow as the cab swings a right onto Columbus Ave., fake-brakes and guns it through a red light. The mark of a professional. If Grandma were crossing the street, he would’ve swerved to take her out, too, burnish his reputation.
It’s a little past nine, traffic light, which forces me into a sprint until we hit the glass cubes of the new Boston Police headquarters and take a right up Ruggles.
Take a crowbar to your heart
And pry it loose
Just don’t blow a fuse
While everyone’s throwing stones
On Huntington, the cab turns left and then about a half mile later left again, crossing the MBTA tracks where they wind up North Broadway toward Jamaica Plain, the terrain getting hilly, forcing me to stand up on my pedals and dream of a cure for gravity.
Lonely,
lonely, lonely hearts
There’s nobody like lonely
lonely lonely hearts
You know that I can hear your heart beat
I know what’s going on—
The static comes in hard then, a hot-skillet explosion that blinds me for a moment and sends me careening against the line of parked cars, my toe clips shaving paint off a minivan before I clip the mirror and swerve back into the street. I lose sight of the cab cresting the wide curve of Centre but there are multiple traffic lights ahead and I catch up when the driver hits a red light and concedes a full stop.
The cab passes me again in front of the giant plaster cow’s head sticking out of the J.P. Licks building, business brisk even at this time of night, and we cruise the next quarter mile past funky soft-glow restaurants and coffee shops before turning onto Lafayette, which winds through the Hispanic hold-steady section of JP, a formerly Irish borough that had ceded to a Mexican and Dominican wave in the 1980s and sunk just enough roots not to be easily supplanted as the new money poured in.
When the cab pulls over in front of the Hacienda restaurant on the corner of Lee Street and Mayfair, I zip by and circle the block past two large plate glass windows with heavy red curtains drawn across, blocking the interior views, maybe meant to dissuade the neighborhood hipsters from checking out the vibe in case the young men smoking and jostling at the curb weren’t enough of a deterrent.
Posters and handbills are taped to the windows to the right of the door. I roll past too quickly to read them, with the exception of a large Spanish Budweiser poster that has olive- and dark-skinned Latinas posed provocatively in red and white bikinis. Beach balls. Sand and surf. Foaming bottles of Bud. It’s not subtle, but it is effective. All of a sudden I crave a Budweiser. And a Latina girlfriend.
Andino steps out of the cab leading with his guitar case, his appearance setting off a near-choreographed flicking of cigarettes to the curb, one man peeling off back into the club. The shortest of the crew unburdens Andino of his guitar case just as another group of young men exit the restaurant, each one giving him a deferential nod before Shorty leads him into the L-shaped alley that runs behind the restaurant and exits out the other side on Lee Street.
I lock my bike about forty yards away, a wave of mariachi accordion music spilling out as another man, older, with a full head of dark hair and matching mustache, steps to the curb, surveys the street, and rounds back to the alley.
I take Solarte’s camera out of my pack, step into a doorway, and unscrew the exposed lightbulb with a quick twist. After a few minutes and a half dozen pictures, the original batch of young men regroups and fresh cigarettes are lit. Andino and the dark-haired man aren’t with them. Which means either I’d lost him as they’d strolled out the other end of the alley or there’s a back door and they’ve entered the club.
I watch the bar for about a half hour, cooling down quickly as my sweat dries in a chill breeze, and slip on the Zen Moving Company T-shirt over what I’m wearing.
All the smokers are young and wearing golfing outfits in colors I’ve only seen in tub-size sherbets produced by Monsanto. Radioactive lime green pants. Pornographic pink shirts with orange stripes tight on their biceps and flat chests. Identical neck tattoos and Mexican national fútbol club haircuts, buzzed above the ears, long, chisel-stiff, and swept to one side across the top.
Fifteen more minutes pass and I realize why cops prefer their stakeouts from cars. Heat. And the ability to pee into their empty coffee cups. It also dawns on me that maybe I’m not cut out for this type of work. It’s the lack of movement, I think. The act of not acting.
“So move,” I say aloud, confirming what my father had often told me, that I liked the sound of my own voice too much.
Nonetheless, move I do.