“I took the bandage off myself, so I don't know if it was the best thing.”
“Don't worry, you look better with it off, right? And when you look better your spirits soar, which always improves the healing process, so coming up right behind it should be your complete cure. Okay, what I can do for you straight off the skin of my head is the following. Present the civil court a petition of redress in your name exerting upon them in no uncertain terms the pressing need if not fullfledged professional necessity on your part to, nah, that won't do. Your predicament's more complex. Give me a day to filter through it. But it by all means seems, and this is from the heart, not the legalese brain, that every human being conducting a legitimate business in the city ought to have the indivisible right to get his commercial trash collected just as every private carter ought to have the same right to refuse to handle a customer if it's not because of race, religion, sex and the rest of those reasons. But let me quote my rates so we later don't have to resort to blows over it because we didn't know such and such was the price, right? For the brief I'll have to draw up in your behalf in the next few days and which should rescind your fines and violations, impose a restraining order on Stovin's and force one of the other carters to accept you as a client, it'll be eight hundred dollars plus whatever ancillary expenses are required for cabs and calls and so forth, agreed?”
“I don't have that kind of money.”
“You own a bar, don't you, so you must do well.”
“It's a small inexpensive joint for too much rent and with all the companies who service me raising their prices from month to month. It barely stays afloat.”
“Then sell it, because you can't win without a lawyer. With the rest of the money from your bar's sale and possibly compensatory penalties you'll get from Stovin's, you can open another place.”
“I couldn't get much for the bar. Maybe a little something for a few of the older fixtures. But nothing enough for opening a new bar and zero from anyone for taking over the bar's name and lease.”
“What kind of ready money do you have then?”
“A hundred, fifty, like that but at the most.”
“To get even the brief typed without pages of smudge marks and wine stains and a couple of court copies made will cost me more than that.”
“Then how about one of those free voluntary whatever-they-are lawyer organizations for people like me who can't afford high fees?”
“Mine's not high, it's low. But because it's the slow season and with my own onslaught of bills to pay, I could reduce it for you by two hundred or so.”
“I still can't, so what about that Legal Aid group?”
“I hope your joint earned you a poverty level income or less last year and the state declared you an indigent, because if not, Legal Aid can't touch you.”
“I at least got above poverty, thank God.”
“Was what you earned the same amount you reported?”
“Every penny I made I reported and paid all the taxes on too.”
“No wonder you're in so steep. I don't know what to say, baby. You haven't the money, then you can't engage me and for sure no other lawyer and you're now wasting what might be left of your hard-earned income on what I charge for professional advice over the phone. That costs twenty dollars per quarter of an hour, seventy-five for the full. If I handled your case that charge would be appliable to the big fee. Since we only spoke fourteen minutes, my timer says, plus my chitchat now about what I cost over the phone and so forth, which I don't charge for but is time-consuming. I'll make it a flat seventeen just for you. Mail it to my business card address.”
“What I phoned for wasn't so much advice but an estimate.”
“Fifteen then, but that's rock bottom.”
“Still, it doesn't seem fair.”
“You send me that fifteen, chiseler, or I'll haul you into Small Claims and get you for what you owe me plus what my rates are to take two hours away from work and cab fare back and forth,” and hangs up.
I call back and say “Listen, Mrs. or Miss Pershcolt, don't forget how you first got me. I'll tell the judge that by law you're not supposed to take me on as a private client when I was originally assigned to you as a public.”
“You win, you mooch, but I hope those Stovin creeps and all the city department slobs wind up with your shirt, socks and jockeyshorts and whatever you got underneath and in the middle of a major street.”
“Thanks,
lady.”
“Oh, you going to be so asinine to give me an argument about that too?”
“No, I don't know what asinine is, but go on, get out of my lifeâdie why don't you please, you SOB,” I scream and she's laughing and I hang up.
I think give it up, sell out, let it go for peanuts if that's the only way to get rid of it, walk away from it even if that's what it has to come down to, start another bar in some other city or a different business in this one or work for a barowner or chain or just give yourself the time to do whatever you want to do with the money you might end up making from the bar's sale. But those aren't constructive thoughts how to deal with the two main problems: what to do about reopening the bar and carting away its garbage, so think some more.
Maybe if I don't think about it and do something else for the next few hours or entire day, something will come to my head like a bomb going off. But what do I know from anything to do but work, eat, sleep and now drink? I pour another scotch and think forget that too: you'll be blind by the night and a lush by morning or getting to be with maybe never another constructive thought about anything again but taking another drink, which isn't.
I pour the scotch back in the bottle, lick my fingers where it dripped, put my rubbers and coat on and go to a movie house around the block just to do something but thinking about drinking and the garbage and bar.
Nobody stands so I squeeze along my aisle, brush an opened box of candy off my seat, sit down, my foot accidentally kicking an empty beer or soda can which rolls a few rows to the front before stopping I suppose against a seat leg or someone's shoe. But I leave in an hour. After twenty or more years of not seeing a picture except on the bar's TV, and that just snatches of but I don't think ever a whole one straight through, it seems I've lost all interest in them or just can't get in the mood and also every seat I tried was too uncomfortable with springs popping or padding sticking
out and the theater seemed
infested besides.
I buy a book off the paperback rack at the drugstore and go to a coffeeshop and read it while having a sandwich and milkshake. It's a novel about an old plantation family years ago. Maybe it's a good story and the writing's surely all right and scenes and people true to life or at least what I know from those days, but the book or maybe just reading them or particularly at this time just isn't for me. I give the book to the counterman along with my tip and money for the check and he says “Don't bother, I can hardly rest long enough to breathe.”
“Give it to a customer and he'll appreciate it and maybe give you a bigger tip.”
“All right, I'll give it to a customer. Hey mac,” he says to me, “like to read a terrific spicy new pocketbook for free?” and we laugh and I lay down an extra quarter to my tip and take the book and drop it in a trashcan on the street. Now that's the type of guy I should've got to work for me when I had the chance: tough but good sense of humor and smart and he looks honest and reliable, though who can tell till you really see?
I'd like to go to the park just to walk and in the quiet think, but it's freezing and getting dark and I'm a little afraid to after what I've heard and read in the news what happens in there.
I go back to the hotel and watch TV in the lounge. The people there are so noisy and such a bunch of sad old rummies who make me feel sad that I rent my own set, carry it up, turn it on, off, in ten minutes I can tell that all late afternoon television, in the lounge or anywheres, is just too dumb and phony for me. But what does a person do when he has nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in? I lie on the bed and play with myself just to again do something and maybe get off a bit of tension and see the cemetery letter on the dresser while I'm doing this and think that I still haven't sent the check for the gravesite's maintenance yet. And then that I haven't been out there for years because I couldn't find the time to and that might be a good spot to forget all my bar problems and such till I suddenly in the quiet there solve them.
I call the cemetery and get directions because I forgot them after all these years. “It's late,” person I speak to says, “but you can make it if you catch the next train and grab a cab at the station.”
I put on my warmest clothes and boots and catch that train. It doesn't move for a half-hour after departure time and then goes unusually slow for even a suburban train, getting to the station an hour later than it was expected and a few minutes before the cemetery's supposed to close.
I get a cab at the station and the driver starts taking me a different way. “Where you going?” I say. “I remember the ride and unless all the roads have changed since or they've moved the cemetery, then at that light back there you should've made a left instead of a right, because I know it's not down this drive.”
“You said Saint Athemus, correct? So this is the quickest most direct way there.”
“I told you Pearlwood, loud and clearâPearlwood, so don't give me it you didn't hear.”
“I didn't. You claiming I did? I didn't. I distinctly heard you say Athemus. But you don't like the way I drive or a man can't make a simple mistake with you, which mine only might've been but I swear wasn't, then what do you want me to do?”
“To be absolutely fair, deduct a half-dollar off the meter and I'll be satisfied.”
“And have it come from my pocket? Because that's what my boss will want. He'll say I was cheating him.”
“I'll write a note for you that you weren't.”
“He won't take notes. He'll say I could've signed anyone's name to it and he could be right.”
“I'll put on it my phone number and address.”
“For the fifty cents owed him you think he'll phone you on what could be a dollar call? Just tell me you'll pay the full fare that's on the meter or I'll have to let you off here.”
“You leave me out here wherever the hell we are and I'll tear the back of your cab apart.”
“Try and I'll lock you in and call Cab Control who'll call the cops.”
He presses a button on the steering wheel and all the door locks snap down another notch. I try pulling up my lock but can't. There's a steel screen between us and I say through it “Okay okay, no more complaints. Get to Pearlwood fast as you can and I'll pay.”
“Now you're talking sense.”
He turns the cab around and drives to Pearlwood and stops at the cemetery gate and says through the screen “Eight dollars.”
“Meter reads four-fifty.”
“I have to ride back and have no customers here because your cemetery's closed. And I don't feel like waiting for you, even if you wanted me to, at the dollar-every-three-minutes time. For one reason, you might leave through one of the side ways if you got in and for another, I know you're not giving a tip. So the eight or I take you back to the station and let you off after you pay the four-fifty plus whatever the new reading is from here to there.”
I put a ten in the screen tray and he gives me two dollars change and presses the button that releases the locks. I get out.
“Piece of advice,” he says.
“I'll give you.”
“No listen, see that phonebooth there? When you call a Meyermeg cab to get back, don't ask for Nate's.”
“Bastard,” I yell. He waves and drives away. Never should've yelled anything like that in front of here. About death I'm a bit superstitious and make the religious sign with my fingers over my chest and then think that's ridiculous and rub it off and ring the bell on the cemetery gate. Voice on an intercom above the bell says “Cemetery closed for the day.”
“Please, I've come a long way.”
“Sorry, closed, good day.”
“Look, I haven't seen my parents or sister in years and I can get out here just about never.”
“Next time come earlier.”
“Next time I will, that's a promise, but this time give me a break.”
“I shouldn't but could.”
“Yes?”
“That's it. I shouldn't but could.”
“So what'll it take?”
“What are you saying?”
“I'm saying can we talk straight?”
“Anyone with you?”
“You can't see through that camera thing on top of the gate?”
“It's dark behind you. People can lie in shadows and what I'm seeing you through is a cheap set.”
“Nobody's with me.”
“Then we can talk, but be circumspect.”
“Will a five or ten dollar cash contribution get me in for a half hour?”
“Contribution to the cemetery.”
“Cemetery.”
“Fifteen minutes total is all I can spare you once we reach your plot. You don't know where it is, I can be of service in another way, as I've this direction book to help.”
“It's in one of the rows to the right off a driveway. I can't miss it as it's in a meadow almost by itself.”
“Others have gone up all around it.”
“Louise and Lester Fleet then. And my sister, with the same last name, and our grandparents, Dondon, in adjacent graves.”
“All I need. E-F-Fl-Fleet. Agnes. Lester and spouse. Corelated: Beatrice and Daryl Dondon the third. Row 141, section 7S. Wait for me.”
Drives down, gets out of his car, says hello and sticks his mitted hand through the gate. I shake it. “That's fine, pleasure's all mine. But the you-know-what.”