Jail just plain sucks.
The handful of times my job brought me there I always felt like it gave me a hangover. Part of it was that it was such an obvious failure as a system for the people incarcerated and part of it was some of the pure evil that lurked in there. I’m not naïve enough to believe we don’t need jails or that jails should be philosophical retreats where everyone gets hugged all day. People like Jane seemed to have the right mixture of common sense and the desire to help the problem. She didn’t spend time trying to figure it out. She kept her world and her goals small and focused. I guess it’s what the twelve-steppers call “Keeping it Simple.”
I headed to AJ’s to drink Schlitz and think deep thoughts. If Kelley was there, I figured I wouldn’t bring up anything deeper than the Yankees’ middle-relief issues. The Fearsome ones were in and tonight’s intellectual foray was on the subject of popular music.
“He had his stomach pumped,” Rocco was saying. “It’s a known fact.”
“Hold it,” Jerry Number One said. “Rod Stewart or Elton John?”
“I always heard it was Rod Stewart,” TC said.
“Nah,” Jerry Number Two said. “It was Elton John—haven’t you ever seen the hats that guy wore?”
“What the hell does that have to do with getting his stomach pumped?” TC said.
“A man’s haberdashery says a lot about him,” Jerry Number Two said.
“What does that say about Sinatra?” said Jerry Number One.
“Be very careful,” Rocco warned. “This conversation is over.”
Everyone knew you just didn’t disrespect the Chairman of the Board in Rocco’s presence. There were very few things held as absolutes at AJ’s, but holding Sinatra in the proper regard was one of them. Never mind the general theme of the conversation, you just didn’t disrespect Frank.
The stuff I love with the brown-and-white label was slid in front of me. Kelley wasn’t around, which was good because even if I was tempted, I couldn’t bug him for details on Walanda, Shony, Mikey, or Eli. Tonight it was just me, the Foursome, and the Yanks on the tube. Tonight, Mussina was pitching and Alex Rodriguez was in the middle of twelve-game hitting streak. A-Rod was making about twenty-five million a year and I was trying to figure what his weekly paycheck looked like. Even without the Schlitz that was tough to do, but after slamming three on an empty stomach, my desire to figure it out slipped away. I did wonder if he had to go to the business office and see a guy like Sam who wouldn’t give him a check until he got told a Polish joke—or in Rodriguez’s case a Mexican joke, or was it a Dominican joke? Ahh—fuck it.
Matsui had just bounded into a double play when I heard Rudy come in. Rudy wasn’t a regular-regular, but he came in often enough to have earned his AJ’s stripes, which meant his balls were up for being busted like anyone else’s.
“Hey, it’s the good doctor,” Rocco announced.
“Hey Rude,” Jerry Number One said. “My prostate’s been acting up again. Wanna give it a look?”
“Tell you what, Jer,” Rudy said. “You’re a big enough asshole—why don’tya squat on a mirror and do it yourself?” he said.
That got a few laughs, but its edge was a little sharp for Rudy. I tapped the bar in front of me once to alert AJ that I wanted to buy Rudy’s drink. Rudy looked like he needed one, and I heard him order a Hennessy with specific instructions for AJ not to bruise the ice.
I slid off my stool and headed down to the one on Rudy’s right, away from the Foursome. Rudy had beads of sweat on his forehead and great big rings of sweat under his arms. The man was stressed out.
“Rude,” I asked, “you all right?”
“Fuck, yeah,” Rudy exhaled heavily and took a serious sip of the brandy. “That fuckin’ prick Gabbibb …”
“What’s up with him?” I asked. “Or is it just his usual bullshit?”
“That fuckin’ asshole is Broseph’s suck-up. They’re both on my ass because of my charts being behind. Gabbibb blows off any of my recommendations, and he’s so fuckin’ arrogant I want to rip his throat out.”
“So it is his usual shit,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess,” Rudy said. “There’s no doubt Gabbibb’s a fuckin’ genius, but where’s the rule that he has to be a fuckin’ asshole to go with it? Besides all that, I get the sense I’m being set up.” Rudy got quiet and stared at his drink.
He ran his fat, stubby fingers through his thin hair and drank his cognac. He vented like this frequently, and I was glad to listen. The man had done me more than a few favors over the years.
“Is that all that’s getting you? You usually don’t let the DAT man rile you like this,” I said.
“No, there’s something else.” Rudy looked down into his Hennessy and ran his stubby index finger around the rocks glass. “The hospital administrator, Dr. Broseph, is going to take away my privileges.”
“Privileges? What’s that mean, you won’t be able to golf at the club or something?”
“Nah, Duff.” Rudy looked up but not at me. He stared mindlessly into the mirror on AJ’s back wall. “Privileges are what allow you to practice in the hospital. Without privileges you don’t work.”
“You’re saying you’re getting canned?”
“Pretty much.”
“How can they can a doctor? Who’s going to take care of your patients?” I said.
“That’s the problem, Duff. Broseph says my average length of stay is three days over the average and that’s unacceptable.”
“Average length of stay?”
“How long each patient of mine is in the hospital.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Rudy threw down his entire drink and motioned to AJ for another.
“The way it works now, the insurance companies pay the hospital by the ailment. The longer a patient stays in the hospital, the less money the hospital makes,” Rudy said.
“What if the patient isn’t ready to go home?”
“Too bad—they send them home and have a nurse visit once a day. Except I won’t go for it and I’ve defied his orders to discharge patients.”
“And now it’s going to cost you your job?”
“Yep.” Rudy finished the second Hennessy. “It’s even worse for your guys. They all have Medicaid, which pays shit, so they are always getting run out. Sometimes they find reasons to refuse them admission, which is, by the way, against the law,” Rudy said.
“That’s bullshit. I can’t believe you’d get fired for taking care of people.”
“Yeah, Broseph ordered me to send home an eighty-three-year-old woman two days after her hip replacement operation even though she lived alone. He said she’d be fine because we assigned her homecare.”
“He can do that?”
“You better believe he can. The guy takes in half a million a year, more if the hospital finishes in the black. He’s got a mansion outside of town with two Mercedes and a Porsche. He treats people like shit.”
“Can’t you sue him or bring him to some board or something?”
“Ahh, fuck it, Duff, it doesn’t work that way. Everything he does is wrapped up in all this hospitalese that makes it sound like he’s loving and caring. Look, let me change the subject.”
“Sure, please,” I said.
“I got some mixed news on one of your guys,” he said. Rudy’s tone had changed. He was speaking as a doctor again, not an AJ’s rummy.
“Mixed?” I said.
“Mikey came out of the coma, and he looks like he’ll make it,” he said.
“What’s the but, Rude?” I said.
“They found cancer in him,” Rudy exhaled hard. “He’s got pancreatic cancer pretty bad. They’re going to have to go after it aggressively.”
“Fuck … what the fuck kind of luck is that?” I said to no one in particular.
“No kind of luck at all,” Rudy said back.
Rudy explained to me the type of therapy Mikey would be up against. It involved radiation to get the cancer but it would also mean a brutal toll on Mikey’s body. Mikey was obsessed with his appearance, and losing his coif, his tan, and his body weight would be devastating for him emotionally. There wasn’t a choice, but this was going to be an incredibly hard row for Mikey to hoe.
It also meant that Mikey, Rudy, and me would be dealing with Gabbibb all the time. Cancer-wise, there wasn’t a better man in the country. Human-wise, I would rather get jabbed in the eye with a sharp stick than have to deal with him. I guess if the guy could keep you alive when the grim reaper paid a visit, I shouldn’t care what kind of asshole he was.
There was something else on my mind.
“Rudy?” He was busy ordering a double order of wings from AJ, so I waited for just a second.
“What’s up, Duff?”
“Mikey say anything about who beat him?” I said.
“He was kind of in and out, but he kept talking about some bald bastard. You know how Mikey talks,” Rudy paused trying to remember Mikey’s words. With a bad imitation of Mikey, Rudy continued. “‘That bald biker bastard …’ was what he kept saying, but he was pretty close to delirium.”
“Couple more Schlitzes and I’ll be pretty close to delirium myself,” I said.
Rudy’s wings were delivered and I didn’t want to disturb him or witness the carnage that was involved when a stressed-out Rudy sublimated his emotions on twenty-four innocent chicken wings. Instead, I went back to my original spot and watched the Yankees middle relief blow their lead.
I lost count of the Schlitzes and figured it was time to check in on Al, so I began to head for the door. The Foursome had a new focus as I was leaving.
“Yeah, the pilots got in big trouble,” Rocco said.
“What?” TC wasn’t buying it. “You’re telling me that the Navy pilots were deliberately flying over groups of penguins just so they’d tip over as they flew by?”
“I’m 100 percent serious,” Rocco said.
“Isn’t it dangerous for jets to tip over like that?” Jerry Number Two said.
“God, you did too many drugs, Jer,” Rocco said. “Not the planes, the penguins. They would look up and tip over while they watched the jets fly by.”
“How’d they get back up?” Jerry Number One asked.
“The Seals helped them,” Rocco said.
“I wonder if their whiskers tickled the penguins’ backs?” Jerry Number Two asked.
“You asshole,” Rocco said. “The Navy Seals.”
“I wonder how they keep the sailor caps on … ?” I heard Jerry Number Two say as the door closed behind me. I headed home and didn’t even try to sort out the day, there was just too much. The Schlitz evened it out a little for me and I let Elvis take me home.
The ride to the Moody Blue isn’t a long one, but between the industrial section of Crawford at night and the deserted area where I live there isn’t much traffic. It probably wasn’t anything, but a block or two after I left AJ’s, I noticed a Crown Victoria was behind me. It was silver and it was pretty new, and whoever it was stayed behind me all the way home. When I pulled onto the gravel in front of my house, the Crown Vic just kept going. It was probably nothing.
The next day, I was in the office waiting for Clogger McGraw to show up for his 9:00 a.m. session. At about 9:35, the Clogster knocked on my door.
“Yo, Duff, what’s up?” Clog was wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt with little airplanes all over it.
“Clog, you’re a little late, man,” I said.
“I am? Shit, sorry man,” he said without a clue about his tardiness.
We got a little into the session and it was tough to focus Clog on any real sobriety-related issues. He was so thrilled with the Yankee Stadium gig that it was hard to get him to talk about anything else.
“It’s a rush, man,” Clogger said, wide-eyed. “The crowd cheering, the announcer, the rolls … the whole thing, man. I’m lovin’ it,” he said.
I couldn’t really find anything wrong with Clogger’s new gig, though I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t doing the whole deal stoned. He was happy, he was working, and he didn’t seem to be hurting anyone.
“Oh yeah, Dr. Gabbibb is giving me some work too,” he said.
“Gabbibb is buying a sign for you to pull?” I asked.
“No, man, he’s having me use my plane to deliver shit to Staten Island on the same nights I do the Yanks.”
“What kind of shit does Gabbibb need delivered?”
“Electronics shit, Duff.” Clogger scratched the side of his head. “You know, CD players, pagers, cell phones. He has two cousins who are always doing business together. The one guy Enad runs an electronics type store in Staten Island. The other guy, Tunad, has a convenience store twenty miles from here in East Dunham. I pick up some shit from them and deliver it back and forth. Each run gets me an extra fifty. Gabbibb even gave me a free cell phone.”
“Not a bad gig,” I said.
“Sweet, man,” Clogger said.
Clogger and I talked halfheartedly about some of his relationship issues. Clogger had a strong preference for Asian women and he had dated or lived with a string of them. The current one, Foon, barely spoke English, but she was a great cook and lived her entire life to please the Clogman. We kicked around the idea that intimacy might be limited by their ability to understand each other, but Clogger disagreed and really believed the fact that it was ideal that Foon and he could barely exchange pleasantries. There wasn’t much to argue about and Foon not only was great in the kitchen and around the house, but she was also quite accomplished in the bedroom. Clogger speculated that before leaving Thailand, Foon may have had some professional experience in the art of pleasing men, but that was not at all an issue for him. She had shown him her tests from the health department and that was all the man needed for domestic bliss.
I finished up with Clogger and wrote a note in his file and got ready for my next session. Sherrie was due out of jail last night, and she was supposed to come in this morning. Trina buzzed me right at ten thirty, and I went to greet her in the waiting room and saw that she was wearing a Knicks cap, pulled down over her eyes. When I said hello and went to shake her hand, I saw why. She had two black eyes and her lips were swollen and split.
“Sherrie,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”