Fleet Week
Mike swabbed his tongue across the knots of his hairy fist. He looked at us, reared back, and punched his open palm with a wet smack. “I swear to Christ,” he said. “If I got to be the one teach those whores a lesson, so be it.”
There were five of us in that ninth-floor suite at the New York Hilton, but I was the only one who wasn’t excited by that. Mike stood a foot taller than us. Usually, his voice boomed like announcements from a loudspeaker mounted overhead, but he mumbled now, as if he had a mouth full of cheese. Scotch did that to him, and he’d been swilling Chivas for hours. We’d all been drinking since we got off the ship. Stopped at every bar on our way to the hotel, where we drank some more and staggered around the room in our dress white uniforms.
Mike had the most rank on his sleeve, and he’d gotten the room comped by a friend he played high school ball with. “Fucking bitches will pay for keeping me waiting,” he said. “I’ll smash their fucking jaws for them.”
The girls he was having brought in from Queens were supposed to have arrived at twenty-two hundred. It was already half past. I figured we had plenty of time to snag a piece of professional ass and get back to the ship before liberty ended at oh-five hundred.
Mike punched his open palm again and the other three guys grunted their approval.
These guys looked at each other with smiles and little bounces in their knees, like fucking apes. Each of the apes held energy drinks in silver cans that they’d poured vodka into and suckled from. These meatheads were stationed aboard the same ship as Mike and me, but I didn’t know them that well.
I knew Mike from my periodic work topside and from my old neighborhood in Yonkers, which is where I should have been, visiting my mother instead of waiting for hookers in a hotel room. But I hadn’t seen my mother since I enlisted and she said I was dead to her. I wasn’t obligated just because my ship was in New York for fleet week. Besides, we’d be getting underway in the morning and I couldn’t face another month at sea without getting at least one piece of ass.
“I’ll choke a bitch out,” one of the guys said. These guys were mixed-martial arts wannabes from the machine shop. They all had grease under their fingernails and cauliflower ears and a blood lust that made them more like pit bulls than apes.
I laughed a little into my bottle of beer. I suppose it was nervous energy. I needed these girls to show. If I didn’t get my rocks off with a girl soon, I’d be doomed to weeks of nothing but nightly dates in my rack with a dog-eared Playboy and a sock.
One of the pit bulls said, “You got a problem, asshole?”
I ignored the guy like I didn’t hear him, then sidestepped along the front of the couch, took a seat, and smoothed the downward points of my black neckerchief. I kept a roll of quarters wound up and hidden in the neckerchief. It was an old Navy trick that kept the neckerchief in place, ensured I always had at least ten bucks on me, and in case of a real emergency, the whole setup served as my Liberty Hammer—a weapon to take off and sling around, capable of serious damage. So far, I’d only needed it once, when I was cornered on the wrong street in Barcelona. I took out two street punks who were after my wallet.
“Hey!” the guy barked.
“Easy Carver,” Mike said, as if soothing a barking dog. “We’re all friends here.”
“Relax,” I said, looking at the guy from my seat on the couch. “I don’t give a shit about these bitches, as long as I get to fuck one of them before you rearrange their faces.”
“I’ll go last,” the antsy guy, Carver, said. “So I can bash her skull as I bang her.”
“You guys are unbelievable.” I set my beer on the coffee table and sank back to stare out the windows overlooking Fifty-Fourth Street.
A fly crawled up the other side of the window. It looked like it was about to be blown off the building and hurled down into the street by the wind. Cars lined up below the window. Their horns, undiminished by the distance, sounded tinny.
“Always on the attack,” Big Mike said, and his team of pit bulls grunted again with that bounce in their knees.
“That’s right,” they said, fist-bumping one another.
“Hell yeah,” one of them said.
“You’re all as stubborn as a three-flush skid mark,” I said. “Even when it comes time to fucking, you’d rather think about fighting?”
“Listen,” Mike said. “No whore is going to disrespect me. And don’t even get me started on the state of customer service in this country these days.”
The doorbell rang.
Mike looked toward the door and then back to me and his goons. “Remember,” he said, smoothing his hair. “We fuck them first, and then we beat the shit out of them.”
***
The first part of the con was for Mike to act sweet to the girls. As he opened the door, he said, “Welcome,” and then some other shit that I couldn’t make out from the distance between the window and the door. His voice was no more distinct than the rumble of a street bike idling at the intersection downstairs from that window.
Mike guided the hookers from the foyer into the suite’s living room and raised a hand of each of the girls and whistled as they pirouetted for him. The girls wore short skirts and high, plastic heels. The tall one was California tan. The other was pale. Their legs were long, firm, and ready to wrap around each of us.
“Beautiful,” Mike said. He mumbled something, which the girls laughed at. They both had dark hair. One wore hers down around her shoulders. The other’s might have passed aboard ship for Navy regulation. I’d never gotten hot for a chick with short hair, but I was immediately attracted to this one. Her face had a glow to it that made it impossible for me to look away. Her friend was the type I hadn’t seen since I was stationed in San Diego. The short-haired chick smiled at me then.
One of the meatheads leaned toward me and said, “See that heart-shaped necklace the little pixie’s wearing?”
I lowered my focus from the girl’s eyes to her neck. Dangling from a gold necklace was a gold heart outline that was open at the top. I nodded, but didn’t speak.
“After I fuck her,” the meathead said, “I’m going to bash her face in and then rip that fucking necklace off and shove it up her cum-filled snatch.”
The randomness of that couldn’t have surprised me more if it smacked me on the back of the head. I broke ranks with them and walked up to Mike. “I’ll pay double to go first,” I said.
“Which one?”
The apes hooted and hollered.
“I want her.” I pointed toward the girl with close-cropped hair that accentuated the right angle of her nose. It wasn’t a big nose, but it was distinct and sharp, like the chiseled corner of the granite countertop in the kitchen behind us. Her nostrils were tiny, as if they’d never been picked. I leaned in toward Mike and said, “If it’s cool with you, I’d like to get a head start. Alone, if you know what I mean.”
Mike backed up, spread his arms, and bellowed, “I know this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, but damn that’s ballsy.” He walked toward the bar and poured himself another highball glass of Chivas. “But I’ll tell you what,” he said, his voice Scotch-slurred. “Since we go way back and you’ve got the stones to ask, what the hell.” He then turned to the goons and announced, “You boys don’t have a problem with that, right?”
While they were nodding into their own chests, Mike told me, “You go ahead and take all the time you need. Use the master bedroom.” He then looked out to the group of guys and smacked both girls on their asses with his open palms. “I bet that’ll be a full fifteen minutes.”
Everyone, including me, laughed.
***
When I got the short-haired hooker into the master bedroom, I didn’t hike up her skirt and slap the wood to her or anything. It wasn’t that I was planning to take it slow. I just wanted to get her the fuck out of there. I did as fast a recon of the room as I could. There was a door that I assumed was just a closet.
“So,” she said, leaning on the edge of the bed with her legs jutting out in front of her. She then began clanking the platform soles of her shoes together in a rhythm I didn’t recognize. “What is it you like?” The accent was Russian, best I could figure it, and for a moment it surprised me.
“I like blueberry pie,” I said, taking her by the hand. “And I’d like to go get some right now. Wouldn’t you?”
“What pie?”
“Blueberry. I know a place that has the best in town. It’s downtown. Big fucking purple berries. Crust so flaky it almost falls off your fork.”
“You are serious?”
“Way I figure it,” I said, pulling her toward the door, “your time is mine right now, and I want to start with some blueberry pie.”
The hooker shifted, as if she were falling into a beanbag chair. “I don’t want pie.”
“You will when you see it.” I threw her over my shoulder. She was light and feisty at first. As I ran past, the other girl was blowing Mike on the couch by the window and the goons were busy doing shots along the bar. One of them yelled, “Hey.”
I made it to the elevator with the girl over my shoulder as the doors opened with a ding. An older couple exited and shook their heads at us. I stepped inside and dropped the hooker to her feet and pushed the button for the lobby.
“What is hurry?” she said.
“I don’t want the place to sell out of pie, is all,” I said.
We made it as far as the glass doors that open onto the traffic circle out front when I heard the sound of shoes squeaking on the tiled floor. “Okay, I said, “we’ve got to pick up the pace.” I looked around, expecting to see the meatheads, but instead saw some bored kid scuffing the soles of his sneakers across the lobby.
Outside, the valets were huddled and playing cards at the desk. I had hoped to find a cab waiting but the traffic circle was empty. We ran left, down Fifty-Fourth Street and found a cab at a red light.
As I reached out to pull the taxi’s door shut behind us, a pipe—I think it was a pipe, but maybe it was a crowbar—cracked against my forearm before I could get the door closed. The flesh and bone of my forearm heated beneath the white uniform sleeve, where a greasy, metallic smudge remained.
I pushed the door into the attacking ape and knocked him back a step or two, but he scrambled and lunged at the door. I managed to get it closed, but his neckerchief got caught. He banged on the door. “Drive,” I yelled. “Now.”
“Someone is there,” the cab driver said, pointing with his thumb toward the door.
“What fuck is this?” the hooker said.
I couldn’t tell if my arm was broken, but I could barely make a fist. The pain radiated up and down my arm. Made breathing difficult.
Just then, a siren whirled past on Fifty-Fourth Street. The wail pierced the cacophony of taxi horns and assorted street noise.
My arm throbbed as I leaned over and opened the other door, on the side away from the ape, who was screaming and hammering the roof of the cab with one ham-like fist. I shoved the hooker out ahead of me and then grabbed her by the hand, tugging her toward the street. “We have to run,” I said. “Come on.”
***
We ran a couple of blocks, down Fifty-Third, past the Folk Art museum and onto brightly lit Fifth Avenue. I thought it would be safer to be surrounded by light and throngs of other people, but a sailor in dress whites and a hooker in her work attire were too conspicuous. We needed shadows to hide in until we could make it someplace safe.
“Tell me what fuck is going on. Right now,” the hooker said, defiantly stopping in her tracks, catching her balance by resting the heel of her hand on a curbside garbage can.
“You’re in trouble,” I said. “I’m trying to get you some place safe.”
“Why I’m in trouble? Because you take me to eat pie?”
I’d forgotten all about the pie, but I did know a place. And it was a better bet than anything else I might have come up with. “We’re almost there,” I said.
We lurked down the smaller streets. Everything was chaotic and slipshod. This New York was foreign to me. It was no longer my town, but rather just another port. It got increasingly hard to keep hold of the hooker’s hand, as she pulled it away with increasing force every few paces forward. I was pretty sure we’d lost the bastards chasing us. The farther we got from the hotel, the safer I felt on city streets through Koreatown, the Flatiron district, and then over to Bleecker.
The hooker kept pace, but yanked back her hand so resolutely that it stopped me. Reversing momentum like that made my arm throb.
“Where we go?” she asked. “Why can’t we get taxi?”
We could have ridden the 6 all the way, but there were too many people getting on and off the Lex Local. We’d be standing face-to-face with the inquisitive stares of strangers. I preferred mobility on the street.
I grabbed her hand, and before she could slip loose again, we were there.
***
Jolly’s Diner was open twenty-four-seven. No matter what time of day or night, it seemed, Jolly was there. It had been five years since I’d last been there, and though he didn’t seem to recognize me, he nodded the way people do when they see a serviceman in uniform.
I recognized a couple of old regulars: Janice, the bag lady who always had enough money for five or six refills on the same tea bag; and the creepy old guy who sat by the register, working a crossword puzzle from the newspaper. He never spoke to anyone. He kept his head down, slurping soup from a spoon in his shaky right hand. I guided the hooker over to a booth in front of the window, sat her down, and then turned to face Jolly, who had the midsection of a man who enjoyed his own cooking. His demeanor never matched the name.
“Don’t you recognize me?” I asked.
“Sure I do,” Jolly said before coming closer. “Turkey sandwich and tomato soup. What’s it been? Three years?”
“Five,” I said. It had been four years, three months, and seventeen days. I knew this because guys in the Navy count days. Most guys counted the days until they get out. I counted days that I was in. It seemed more productive that way. Like I was building toward something. In this case, I was building toward a career. Counting on serving at least twenty. A lifer. Then collect my pension.
“Five years. Wow. Just look at you.”
“Dress whites, Jolly.” I hid the stain on my sleeve and the pain beneath it.
“You look like one of the Village People.”
“Why do old people feel the need to tell me that?”
“Who’s your friend?” he said, making his way along the counter toward me.
The hooker sat at the booth along the windows that faced onto Bleecker. She kneeled there with her fingertips on the glass, her breath leaving patches of fog. “She’s the favor, Jolly.”
“She’s a sexy kitten, I will say.” Jolly rubbed his chin as he said it. Then his features slid as he said. “But out of the blue you want a favor?”
“Come on, Jolly.”
Jolly came around the counter. “You couldn’t send a postcard once in a while?”
I laughed to play it off, but the thought had never occurred to me. “We’re always out at sea. You know?”
“So who is she?” Jolly asked, backing me up, nodding toward the hooker.
“Far as I know, she’s a hooker from Queens.”
“Sounds about right.”
“She needed help. Besides. Just look at her. How could I not?”
“There are about a million hookers in this city who need help.”
The hooker sat sideways, looking out the window, where the breeze kicked up dirt and Quarter Pounder wrappers within view of the window. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast on the mess decks earlier that morning. Now, the slice of darkness between the buildings across the street reminded me that it was getting late. I was due back to the ship in a few hours.
“You’re probably right. Just watch her for me. Keep her here. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
“A couple hours? What am I supposed to do with her?”
She jumped out of the booth and stepped beside us. “Where is pie?”
“Oh, shit. Right. I forgot.”
“How in fuck you forgot pie? It was whole reason for this, no?”
“Right. Yes. Pie,” I said, looking toward Jolly.
“Coming right up,” he said.
“With milk,” she said. “And not pussy soy shit. Real milk. How you say? Whole milk.”
Jolly didn’t move.
I said to the hooker, “I’ll be right back.”
“You are leaving? Why do I have to stay here?” the hooker asked.
“Some bad shit is going to happen is why.”
“That’s what I’m here for. They pay me. I take it.”
“No. You don’t understand.”
“Look,” she said. “I need cash.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not like that. I’m saving you from some unpleasant shit. Shit that would make your average day look like a day at Disney.”
“Are we going to fuck or not?”
Jolly was right. She was beautiful in all the required ways and I’d certainly fucked worse-looking chicks under worse circumstances. And being close to her like that made me hard below the belt and all mushy above it. “Now isn’t the best time,” I said. “No.”
“What is problem? You take me running for life but don’t fuck me. What’s this shit?” She paced back to the booth and then right back to me. “Unless you are police or queer, you pay for my pussy or you let me go.” Her lip quivered.
I reached out and grabbed her shoulders.
“Ah. This is more like it,” she said. “You show me money first, yes?”
I had a hundred and ninety dollars wrapped around my ID card in my pocket. I could give her all the money as a retainer of sorts, but she wasn’t a taxi waiting by the curb. “Look,” I said. “I’m doing this for your safety, okay? There’s no telling what they’ll do to you if they catch you out on the street.”
“I don’t care about that shit. I am tough. I take it. I need my fix soon.” Her voice shook now, made the accent all but indecipherable. Sweat formed on her high forehead and in the wells of her clavicle. Standing that close to her, I could almost hear her heart.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cash I had rubber banded around my ID card. “Here,” I said, handing her the money, and pocketing my ID.
She took the money. Counted it. “This is all? Where is rest of money?”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“You get no pussy for this,” she said, tucking the cash into a red purse I’d never noticed her carrying before, and walked out the door before the pie arrived.
***
When I made it back to the hotel, I heard a good deal of knocking sounds through the door and was surprised to think a headboard was still smacking against a wall somewhere in that room. It would have been easier to just go back to the ship, but I still needed to clear the air with Mike and the other guys so no hard feelings about any of this shit carried over onto the ship.
I pounded on the door and the knocking stopped. “Somebody’s going to be pissed,” I said, trying to look through the peephole.
One of the pit bulls opened the door. His face was reddened along one side and his T-shirt was torn around the neck. He laughed in my face. “You’ve got to be the dumbest motherfucker on the planet.” He reached out and tugged me into the room by my neckerchief. The roll of quarters dug into my neck.
The other two guys wasted no time rushing me with a flurry of fists and elbows. I managed to trip up one of them by kicking at his ankle and then I pushed another off with as swift a forearm as the earlier injury allowed. I had no real strength in the arm. Backed up to the couch along the window overlooking Fifty-Fourth Street, I slid the neckerchief over my head. The three goons faced me. The standoff didn’t last more than a few seconds. They charged me all at once. I connected a couple times with the quarters, but I couldn’t tell if I’d hit bone or skull. They kept advancing.
My jaw can take a blow from anyone but a southpaw. When I’m hit on the right side, the percussive shock cranks my head sideways with enough velocity to crimp my brainstem, essentially cutting off all motor function. Gravity took me down. And once on the carpet, the kicks and boot heels pummeled me without pause.
Before long, I was no longer able to protect my head. Both forearms felt broken. My back was hamburger, and as I breathed in the dust buried in the carpet I felt the cracks in my ribs, like skewers into my lungs. There was no way to know how long I huddled there, absorbing kicks and punches and elbows, as well as insults and spit. This was the beating the short-haired girl would have taken. The thought of that made the kicks hurt less…for a few minutes.
At some point, I saw a light come on in the crack between the bedroom door and the floor. The next thing I knew, Mike roared, “Get the fuck off of him, you stupid motherfuckers.”
I don’t know if they obeyed directly or if he had to pull them off of me, but once the beating stopped I collapsed onto my side. Blood trailed hot down my cheek and into my ear, rendering me deaf on the side that took the majority of head blows.
“What the fuck?” Mike said. He then knelt near my head and touched my shoulder. “This is our shipmate. And a friend of mine.”
I had no way of knowing how the pit bulls responded. At least one of them spoke. Maybe two. The words were unclear and dim, as if they were being spoken from another room.
“But now that you’re warmed up,” I heard Mike say, “get in there and get busy on that bitch.”
I flinched as the foot traffic passed by me and relaxed only after I felt the door close as they entered the bedroom.
Mike lifted his knee from the floor and planted it hard into the ribs I had covered with my hand. The pressure felt like a torque wrench digging into me, twisting until I’d snap. “Where is the girl?”
“Come on, Mike. She’s just a junkie kid,” I said. “She didn’t deserve this. Let’s call it Steven.”
“Steven?” Mike said. “I haven’t heard that term in years.” He lifted the weight off his knee but kept it hovering there. “I can’t believe you remember that. Sometimes I forget how far back we go, old buddy.”
“Way back.”
“Way back. God, when did we stop saying Even-Steven.”
“Around the time we stopped playing Pepper and Hot Box.”
“You’re probably right. Shame isn’t it?” Mike stood up. Looked a long way down at me. “All right, old buddy,” he said, wiping sweat from his shirtless sternum. “Since you took such a beating we’ll call it Steven. But if I ever see that bitch again, I’m going to take her into a hole and let the fucking rats eat her.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“You know, when I saw you back here, I first thought you were coming for that one in there, too.”
“I don’t care about her,” I said, “but I suppose I’d take another beating to spare her.”
Mike poured himself another Chivas as I pushed myself onto all fours. I still hadn’t had a full breath, but I held air in my lungs and blew it out as I forced myself upright. I nodded to Mike then.
Mike walked over, opened the bedroom door and said into the darkness, “Get off her and get her out!”
And then I was back on the floor, crouched on my knees and elbows, protecting the vital organs, taking more blows to my ribs and head. I heard the whimpering of a woman and then the clicks of heels on tile, but I never heard the door close behind her.
Shortly after, the pack of animals’ punches landed with less authority and the kicks to the head were more like wayward boot scuffs. Eventually they stopped.
Mike lifted my head. “You might’ve survived this, but if you say anything back on the ship, we’ll all deny it. And I’ll bury you.”
I remember grunting, but I have no idea if it was anything intelligible.
“Go on,” Mike said. “Get back to the ship.”
***
I’d passed out on the stoop outside a shoe store. The noise in my head woke me and I thought my brain might explode as I made it to my feet. Two cabs passed me by on Broadway. My jaw still worked, but not in the normal way. Two of my front teeth were gone and my eyes felt swollen, as if the lids were inching toward my cheeks. Breathing through my nose was impossible, but the blood finally had stopped flowing from it.
I used my Dixie cup hat to swab my face and then tossed it into a can on the corner of Mercer and Bleecker where I stood, resting my elbows on the can. Across the street someone was playing tennis at the courts. The lights were on over there, shining bright enough to cast my upper body as a giant black figure on the sidewalk.
The smell of coffee hung thick in the predawn light. There was movement and the noise associated with it. Trucks rolled down streets to make deliveries. Garbage trucks did their thing. Town cars and cabs delivered overachievers and white-collar thieves to their places of commerce.
As I arrived at the gangplank leading to the ship, I reached into my pocket to pull out my ID card. As I did, the absence of cash halted me.
“Go ahead and fuck around out there,” the OOD hollered. “You’re already late, so take your time.”
My eyes were swollen, but I could see well enough. I was too weak to protest. And my ribs hurt too much to utter the words required to talk back to him. The steel handrail was cool as I gripped it.
“If you were smart,” the OOD said, “you’d go find that cover and neckerchief you seemed to’ve lost. While you’re doing that, I’ll be in here, writing you up.”
A ship always seems biggest when you are about to board it, but right then it didn’t look big enough. There were jet engines and helicopters and firefighting equipment and poker games and movie night aboard that ship, and going forward meant endless months at sea, with all of that and those fuckheads from the hotel.
The OOD stood on the quarterdeck with his hands on his hips. “I’m about out of patience, boy,” he said. “Look at you. Bloodied and dirty. You’re a disgrace.”
I stood at attention and stared at him. I thought about saluting. Instead, I turned my back to him, looked out over the pier—back toward the city. I didn’t have any money left, but I walked down the gangplank to shore, my spirits buoyed by the prospect of talking Jolly out of a free piece of pie.