“You owe me ten bucks,” he said, grabbing me around the neck and twisting us both to the ground in the Linoleum Department, never mind the customers who came for carpet when instead a fight broke out. “Forget the money. I’ll take this in payment.” He grabbed a pair of scissors from the counter and cut my tie in half. Back home I had an entire collection of half-ties, mementos.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Ask her. It’s a done deal.”
I really didn’t believe him. Marie was no innocent, but she did have working class values, didn’t she? A hundred bucks and she was his?
It really shouldn’t be that easy, and maybe that’s another reason why I was so nuts about Stephanie.
For her, yes, you would have to write a symphony, maybe Beethoven’s Ninth. (I’m not sure, though, if it worked for him personally, Beethoven, possibly celibate to his grave.)
“The deal is this,” Fat Jack said about his arrangement with Marie.
“Do I have to hear?”
He grabbed me by the collar. I grabbed him right back.
“Yes you have to hear,” he said. “You have to grow up.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s already started, and she was great. Eli, the greatest piece of ass I ever had.” What terms we used to ascribe the beautiful art of lovemaking – piece of ass. What happened to courtliness, chivalry and romance? When did we get so crude? But who was I to talk? I had my own reputation.
“You’re a jerk, you know,” Fat Jack continued, shaking me by the lapels and me shaking him right back. “She spent half the time crying, about how much she was in love with you. She said she was doing it for the hundred bucks because she thought that’s what YOU wanted.”
This made me sick. “She was doing it for me?”
“Forget that.”
“Forget that? Did you give her that impression, that I was in on this?”
“I never said a word about you.”
“Did you straighten her out?”
“It didn’t matter.”
“Well it matters to me that she thinks…”
“She’ll do anything for you, Eli.”
“Did she take the hundred bucks?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Of course she did. Eli, girls were made for fucking. Who knows that better than you, cockhound of the Midwest.”
“Come on.”
“That’s all they’re good for.”
“Your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter…”
“That’s different. We’re not talking family, you yutz. We’re talking girls.”
“Oh them!”
“You’re judging me? You whose conquests number in the hundreds? The THOUSANDS?”
“None of my doing.”
“Oh – it’s that you’re so irresistible they can’t keep their hands off you?”
“No, it’s a winning streak. You should have been around when I had the acne.”
“So now it’s catch-up time?”
“No, Fat Jack. It’s just a hot streak, like the Reds when they’ve got it going.”
Fat Jack wouldn’t understand about the Cincinnati Reds since he was the only local who cared nothing for baseball. For the rest of us the Reds were the beginning and the end. Our lives were tied to the Reds. Fat Jack once got a couple of free tickets and gave them to me and I took Stephanie to the game. Stephanie loved baseball though she wasn’t sure what team they were playing against or even what league they were in. She asked, during the game, if the Reds were as big as the Yankees and I said, who are the Yankees? Which set her straight, I think.
When one of our guys hit a home run everyone got up and cheered and she just sat there, not out of disrespect; she just didn’t know.
She was more used to debutante balls and tennis and lunch on the veranda at the country club.
So I explained that you’re supposed to stand and cheer when someone hits a homerun, which she did, when someone from the other team did. Oh well, my mistake.
“Well I’m playing catch-up to you, Eli,” Fat Jack said. “You don’t have to pay for it; I do. So what? Nature was kind to you. Me, I’m ugly. So I pay. Does that make your conquests purer, more righteous than mine? I don’t think so. You use your looks for barter, I use money. We’re both trading on what we’ve got to offer. So don’t be getting superior on me, Eli.”
“But wasn’t it rotten to make her think she was doing ME a favor by screwing YOU?”
“I didn’t make her think anything, Eli. She drew her own conclusions.”
He said I could still have her.
“Except on Mondays.”
He punched me in the arm. I punched him in the belly.
“You think I care?” I said.
“I know you don’t. That’s the trouble with you, Eli. Ever since you came back from New York.”
“What about before?”
“Before you weren’t so terrific, either.”
“Thanks, Fat Jack.”
“But at least you had Stephanie. That’s why you came back, right? For Stephanie.”
“Maybe.”
“Also because you couldn’t make it there as an actor.” He started pushing me around with his belly, his favorite sport. Fat Jack had some belly, hence his nickname. “You left a loser and you came back a loser. Not that I’m calling you a loser. Between then and now, you also lost Stephanie.”
“Thanks for reminding me, Fat Jack.”
“Of what?”
“That I’m a loser.”
He punched me in the shoulder and kept at it until I gave him one to the belly. He grabbed and twisted my tie.
“You’ve given up,” he said, “and I know why. You’re trying to punish yourself for that other thing.”
THAT OTHER THING was the possible killing of a man. I don’t know for sure. It was a blur. The man was on 72nd Street in New York, between Second and Third Avenues, it was one a.m., I was returning from my night shift as a waiter in Greenwich Village, between auditions, and saw the man beating a boy of about eight years old. He told me it was his son so it was all right.
I said, “You’re killing the boy.”
He said, “Pardon me?”
“You’re killing the boy.”
“Pardon me?”
“I can’t let you do this.”
“Pardon me?”
I blocked his fist from landing another blow to the kid’s head. He took a swing at me with his free arm. I hit him in the throat. He grabbed his throat, gagged, staggered, went down, and was out. That sudden, that fast. The cops came. I was arrested but let go, and never knew why.
I never found out what happened to the kid. I only knew that I had hurt a man unconscious and did not know (to this day) if he ever came around. I had good cause to do what I did. I never could watch this stuff, even in movies or on TV, I mean the abuse of children, or women, and here it was in real life. But when you hurt someone like that (did I take a life?) you do something cosmic. You rearrange the stars. You also rearrange the universe that is you. You can never be the same again. But they let me go, the cops did, and charged me with nothing. Very strange. They never even gave me a chance to explain the correctness of my action.
The cops came after I phoned it in. They checked out the guy, and called for an ambulance, but someone said it may be too late. Anyway, that bruiser, they took him off, hospital or morgue. They took the kid to the hospital, that much I did know about the kid. They took me to a precinct station, locked me in a detention cell and three hours later said I was free to go. I wouldn’t need a lawyer. I wouldn’t need a thing. Goodbye. I was free. As if nothing had happened.
Maybe the kid had told them everything, how I had stepped in for him.
Maybe the guy had a long rap sheet, or mob connections, and they wanted him dead, or locked up. Whatever.
Maybe he was a crooked cop and they wanted all of it hushed. (That still makes the most sense to me.)
Maybe a thousand other reasons.
The point was, I wasn’t guilty.
But I wasn’t innocent, either.
Only Fat Jack knew about this. Only Fat Jack because I trusted him. In business he’d skin you alive. But man to man he was fiercely honest and trustworthy. “You figured the courts didn’t punish you, God didn’t punish you, so you’re punishing yourself,” he was now saying. “I can imagine what it’s like living with that memory. You must have nightmares by the hours.”
Which I couldn’t deny.
“But you can’t live your whole life in retreat,” he said, “in a funk, over something you once did. We all once did something.”