"Yes, sir. Ah, you pay the cashier." He wore an immaculate white three-piece suit, a purple shirt and a white tie.
He even dresses like a faggot Chubby thought. "I'm buyin' this for a friend a mine," Chubby said. "His birthday's today." He watched the man's face for any reaction. "A very good friend of mine named Mikey."
The man flinched, stared at Chubby. "I'll bring it over to the cashier for you." He bent down under the counter for a boxed juicerator.
"Mikey Banion."
Slowly, the man stood up. The color drained from his face. "Who the hell are you?" He was three inches taller than Chubby and leaned forward, his palms flat on the table. Chubby resisted an impulse to grab him by the knot of his tie and yank him over the counter.
"I'm a good friend a yah father's, Paulie."
Paulie stared open-mouthed. "He send you here?"
"Uh-uh, he don't know nothin' about it. Today's his birthday, Paulie. You know what would make a nice present for him? You."
Paulie blew air out of his mouth, his head cocked to the side, a dazed expression in his eyes. "Lissen, Jack, I don't know who the fuck you are, what's the story with you an' my father, or how the hell you found me, but just buy your goddamn juicerator and get the hell outta here, O.K.?" The color came back to his face in mottled splashes. "Jim, you want to take care of this gentleman?" He started to turn away.
Chubby grabbed his tie. "Lissen a me, ya little snot, I don't give a flyin' fuck about you or ya fuckin' job. I'll fuckin' drag you outta here an' throw you at your goddamn father's feet you turn away from me while I'm talkin' to you. You got that?"
Both men were shaking.
"You don't let go of me right now I'll have your ass bounced outta here in two seconds flat," he whispered.
"An' you'll be on disability in three."
They stared at each other, neither blinking for a long moment. Chubby relaxed his grip. Paulie stood up, twisted his neck and straightened his tie. Chubby smoothed down his shirt. "Lissen, kid, I'm sorry. I'm excitable sometimes. I apologize." Chubby raised his hands in submission, then extended one. "My name is Chubby."
Paulie greeted the extended hand with a boxed juicerator. "Please pay the cashier."
"Paulie..." Chubby reached into his back pocket and pulled out a birthday card. "Look, forget comin' home." He placed the card on the demonstration counter. "Just sign this card."
Paulie glanced down.
As you get older, year by year
My love for you grows, father dear
And on this day that your life had begun
Accept this gift of love from me, your son.
"Get out of here!" His eyes bulged, his voice a strangled whisper.
Chubby whipped out his wallet and slid two twenties under Paulie's hand. "Just sign it. I swear to Christ you'll never see me again!" Chubby felt like his guts were being kneaded by brutal hands.
Paulie stepped out of Chubby's reach. The unsigned card and the two twenties lay like a cryptic still life on the counter. "Jim, you want to take care of this gentleman?"
Chubby left slowly, feeling every ounce of his three hundred pounds weighing him down.
"Hey, Chubby," Paulie drawled. Chubby turned. "You see my old man, you tell him he's a grandfather."
***
"Hey! Hey! Whatta you doin'?" Banion shouted, craning his neck over the bar as one of the regulars hung the "closed" sign and locked the door.
"HAPPY BUR-THDAYY TOO YOOO," twenty-five guys started singing. Someone hit the lights and Tommy and Ray Buckley emerged from the back room carrying an enormous birthday cake lit with forty-seven candles. Banion sat speechless in the flickering shadows. They placed the cake on the counter and everybody crowded around the bar.
"Blow 'em out!"
It took Banion four long puffs to get all the candles. Shouts and cheers. Somebody turned the lights back on. Somebody opened the john door and Big Dave Stern came whirring out in a brand-new, fully motorized, thickly upholstered, snakeskin wheelchair. He whirred right up the platform and parked next to Banion, whose eyes were popping out of his head. Dave got out of the wheelchair and with Chubby's help lifted Banion into his birthday present. Banion was in shock. All he could do was sit there stroking the material on the seat and armrests.
"Hey, Banion! Banion! Feel under the seat! Hey, Banion!"
Banion finally looked up. His face was smeared with tears.
"Feel under the seat!"
Banion poked around under the seat and found a snub-nosed .38 with "THE BOUNCER" neatly printed in white on the barrel. Everybody cheered again. Banion let the gun lay on the flat of his palm.
"Hey, watch it. It's loaded!"
"There's a holster sewn on down there."
"Yeah. Don't fart. You'll get shot in the ass!"
Everybody laughed.
Banion felt for the holster and replaced the gun. He sat with his elbows on the armrests, his hands covering his face.
"Banion, ah, you think we might get a drink on the house?"
"You fuckin' guys." He wiped away his tears as Tommy and Chubby moved behind the bar and started serving drinks. He shook his head and laughed. "You fuckin' guys."
A
FTER A DRAG-ASS WEEK
and weekend made even more drag-ass by Stony's hunger to get started at the hospital, Monday came as a total shock. His first day at work was like nothing he expected, and by the end of the day he was completely blown out the back door. Devastated. That night it took all his strength to drag himself downstairs into Butler's waiting car.
"You wanna do D'Artagnan's?"
"Nah." Stony picked his teeth with his thumbnail, occasionally examining whatever stuck between flesh and nail.
"Camelot?" Butler moved out on the street, leisurely following the curving road dwarfed by the gigantic high rises of Co-op City.
"Nah, you wanna do some clams?"
"City Island?" Butler suggested.
"Yeah."
Butler floored the accelerator and tore ass onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. "How'd it go today?"
"The pits, Butler. Fuckin' blue Monday the likes of which I never seen. They got no jobs in the children's ward, so they gave me a gig in geriatrics."
"What the fuck is that?"
"Old people,
very
old people. The fuckin' joint is like the Greyhound terminal for death. An' all these scuzzies is waitin' with their bags packed."
"Whyncha quit? You can do construction work witcher ol' man."
Stony sighed. "I'll stick it out. There might be an openin' in the children's ward next week. If I split now I can't get nothin'."
"So whadya do there?" Butler readjusted his rearview mirror.
"I'm a lifter. I lift people outta beds, into wheelchairs, outta wheelchairs, onta toilets, outta toilets, into whirlpool baths, outta whirlpool baths, back into wheelchairs, outta wheelchairs an' into beds."
"Hey, that sounds all right." Butler turned off the Parkway and drove across the bay bridge onto the mile-long strip of seafood joints and marinas of City Island. "Lobster Box?"
Stony nodded in agreement. They drove slowly along City Island Avenue. The streets were packed with Puerto Ricans. "Geriatrics, hey?" Butler parked the car in front of a bayview restaurant.
"I tell you somethin' though, Butler, the worst thing about that fuckin' place is all the help, all the nurses an' aides an' orderlies. They're all West Indians, man, an' you know I ain't a prejudiced dude, but I hate the fuckin' Bimis with a passion." They sat at a small red-and-white-checked table overlooking Long Island Sound and a parking lot. Butler lit his cigarette from the flame of the candle on their table.
"Whatta you havin', boys?" A white-uniformed, middle-aged waitress in harlequin glasses stood over them, order pad in hand.
"Dozen cherrystones and a Seven-up."
"We got Sprite, orange and root beer."
"A Sprite."
She nodded to Stony.
"Ah, gimme some steamers and a Coke."
"Sprite, orange or root beer."
"Some water with a lot of ice." Stony watched her walk away. "You know what I mean about West Indians? They're the fuckin' angriest, meanest, snottiest people goin'."
"How 'bout Reggie Powell?" Butler leaned back in his chair, tilting it on two legs.
"He's all right." Stony thanked the waitress as she brought over the water. "So they all suck except Reggie."
"Chili Mac's West Indian."
"Get the fuck outta here!" Stony looked shocked.
"I met his old man once. He sounds like Harry Belafonte."
"You're kiddin'!" Stony frowned and gulped down half his glass of water. The waitress brought the clams and steamers. They dug in. "I'll tell you what it is with them. Jamaica's a very heavy-duty place, very poor, especially Kingston. There's a lotta rough numbers goin' down there, some very bad scenes. Everybody's poor as a nigger, that whole colonial riff. They got these dudes, Rudies they call them; bad-ass lots, farm boys that came down to the big city, got stiffed and just hang around rippin' everybody off, an' they got these other dudes called the Rastafaries—you ever see them with those big rug heads? They walk aroun' with machetes tellin' everybody that Haile Selassie's God. They got a lot of these bad boys out in Brooklyn, that whole reggae number. I'll tell you something, the only good thing comin' out of Jamaica's grass." Stony methodically dunked the snout-shaped steamers in a bowl of clam broth and popped them in his mouth.
Butler sat silent except for the slurping noises he made sucking his clams from their shells.
"You know, and they come up here, an' some of them get into a bougie trip, X-ray technicians, registered nurses, white-collar office jobs, go uptown and see Rev Ike every Sunday. You know, money is honey and all that, and they
hate
niggers, New York niggers, street people. They're into this whole high yellow attitude, you know? An' they're closer to Africans than any cat you'll see on Lenox Avenue, but maybe it's that thing of comin' from an English colony. They think they're Limeys. An' when they got jobs in hospitals, uh! Fo-geet a-baht it!
Brutal
motherfuckers, not physically, at least not what I seen, but mentally, they got no respect for human dignity. They talk to these old people like they're six years old. Throw 'em around like sacks a rice. You know, an eighty-year-old dude who's paralyzed takes a dump in bed the fuckin' nurse comes in. 'Oh, Meestah Cohen, you a bod boy, now I got to clean you op.' But like really loud, you know?" Stony winced. "An' I look into this guy's eyes, right? The guy has a Ph.D., spent fifty years teachin' in some college somewhere. He wrote three books." Stony pushed his empty plate away, crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. "It's tragic, Butler. No sense of dignity, ach!" He bit his lower lip. "I gotta get the fuck outta there. You know what this fuckin' guy says to me? The guy's
forty-six
years old. He got Parkinson's disease, paralyzed from his eyebrows down. A goddamn courtroom
lawyer,
Butler. I come into his room, ask him if he needs to go, he mumbles, 'No,' so I says, is there anything I can get for you?' Forty-six-years-old, Butler, a
vegetable,
but I can see his brain is cookin', right? lie mumbles somethin'. I can't hear, so I says. 'What?' An' he mumbles it again, still can't hear him, so I put my ear to his mouth. You know what he says? He says, 'Can you get me justice?'"
"Oh shit." Butler motioned for the waitress. "You got cheesecake?" He turned to Stony. "You want cheesecake?" Stony motioned no. "One piece. You want coffee? Two coffees."
"An' I only worked a half day today. They gave us a four-hour training session this morning that was like somethin' out of "The Twilight Zone." We had to sit in this little classroom that had a dummy in a hospital bed instead of a desk. This nurse came in and showed us how to lift the dummy out of bed, how to put it in a wheelchair. Oh yeah, there was this toilet bowl in the corner of the room an' she showed us how to put the dummy on the pot. It was in-fuckin'-credible. The dummy's name was Mister Rubenstein, an' she was talkin' to the dummy in this Bimi singsong like, 'Now, Mees-tah Roo-bon-steen, eet ees time to go to de bathroom.' I swear she wasn't playin' with a full deck, you know? An' everybody was so fuckin' serious, except this spade cat sittin' next to me, MacDonald." Stony paused as the waitress brought the coffees and cheesecake. "This spade MacDonald, he was laughin' his ass off an' this nurse kept stoppin' an' sayin', 'Thees ees see-re-os beez-noss. Mees-tah Mac-Do-nold,' an' he would straighten out for a minute but when she showed us how to wipe the dummy's ass MacDonald totally fell apart. He lets out with a 'Shee-it, I ain't wipin nobody's ass.' We all fell on the fuckin' floor." Stony pinched his face and put his hands on his hips. " 'Mees-tah Mac-Do-nold, pre-haps you weel dee-mon-strate to os all every-ting I been sayin.' MacDonald's sprawlin' all over his seat like this." Stony slouched in his chair, slowly turning his head
from
side to side, his eyes half-closed and a lazy half grin on his face. "And this cat's wearin' dark blue shades and he's bald, right? The Isaac Hayes number, O.K.? He looks more like a dude that would put people
in
the hospital than help 'em out. MacDonald looks aroun' at everybody an' then he gets up. This fuckin' cat musta been eight feet tall, an' the nurse puts the dummy back in the bed an' she says, 'Mees-tah Mac-Do-nold, take Mees-tah Roo-bon-steen to de bathroom.' MacDonald bops over to the bed and throws back the covers and she yells out, 'Gently! an' tok to heem!' MacDonald does one of these numbers." Stony turns his head to show a hard smirk. "He stares at her for about thirty seconds, an' he turns back to the dummy in the bed an' he says, 'Hey! Mah man Rubenstein! You-all gotta take a dump?' An' this dummy's all dressed up in pajamas, right? He grabs the front of the dummy's pajama top wit' one hand an' he just drops him in the wheelchair. I'll bet he's the only cat who can do the Memphis Glide while pushin' a wheelchair." Stony jumped up and pretended he was pushing a wheelchair, walking with a dip and bop shuffle around the small table. "The nurse is havin' a shit fit, man, she is beyond words. MacDonald takes the fuckin' dummy wit' two hands, raises it over his head an'
throws
the dummy down on the pot. The head falls off, one of the arms falls off. I almost had a heart attack from laughin'. The nurse is screamin' her ass off, an' MacDonald just looks at her an' says, 'Aww, stuff it, bitch! Ah quit!' An' he bops outta the room like he just finished shootin' hoops. The fuckin' room, everybody's dyin'. The hip people are on the floor. The straight an' narrows are havin' the horrors like
they
need the wheelchair. The nurse, Mrs. Churchill,
that
was her name, Mrs. Churchill, she's chasin' after the dummy's head which was rollin' all over the room. The rest of the dummy fell on the floor. Excedrin headache number two-o-two, you know?"