 She took a drag of her cigarette and blew a leisurely smoke ring. “You get what you pay for.” She delivered the line in a manner that suggested she repeated it too many times a day. “Take it or leave it.” That one seemed gratuitous and intended just for him.
Mike liked feisty, and he liked a challenge. He liked a woman who could hold her own.
“What do I get for that?” he asked with a smile.
“Standard,” she replied. “Four-fifty and you can have whatever you want.”
“I think standard will hold me. Do you take credit?”
“Very funny,” she said wearily, “but you’re not paying me enough to laugh. Give me $450, and I’ll chuckle at anything you want.”
Mike opened his wallet, pulled out a wad of bills and peeled off two hundreds. He looked into her averted eyes as he handed them to her. There was no sparkle, he noted, not that he expected any. Yes, she was very, very hard.
She hadn’t made eye contact with him since her initial come-on glance and wasn’t cooperating now. She’d been looking mostly across the street, though occasionally her glance would fall onto a putrid yellow puddle on the pavement near his feet. Mike wondered if she was doing business with a pimp over there in the shadowy alley off Eighth Avenue where she kept looking, or if this was just the way she was...the way it would be all evening. He hoped it was the former, because her remoteness kind of freaked him out. It’s not like he was looking for a soul mate, for God’s sake, but he liked some eye contact when he talked, and it kind of pissed him off when he didn’t get it.
Just to make the point, he slapped her across the face, enjoying the way the dragon tattooed onto the back of his hand glowed in the halogen street lighting as it brushed against her powdery pale face. “I’m paying you enough to look at me, babe.”
“My name’s Lola,” she said, still looking across the street, “not babe. And actually, you’re not.”
• • •
Mike’s preferred locale for liaisons, as he liked to think of meetings like this, was the Hotel Chelsea on 23rd. Considering himself a bit of a connoisseur of both art and literature, he liked the sense of history here: the third-rate paintings by one-time first-rate artists that still decorated the public areas; the knowledge that Mark Twain, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs and even Edgar Lee Masters, for God’s sake, had spent time here; the feeling that the spirits of Larry Rivers and some of the Warhol coven still drifted through these hallways.
That the place was kind of off-putting in its décor, kind of seedy in its upkeep and downright bizarre in its current-day clientele made it all the more appealing. When Mike was with someone like Lola, he didn’t want to be at the goddamn Ritz, or even the Pierre, not that he’d ever actually been in a room there. He wanted a place like this. It just felt right.
He strode up to the check-in counter, proud to be seen with someone as striking as Lola, and asked for room 327, his favorite. Then, indulging his lifelong fear of elevators, he pointed Lola to the stairs and followed her up, admiring the way her calf muscles contracted and bulged with each step. They reminded him of his own biceps, which happened to be his favorite part of his body.
He unlocked the door to 327 and allowed Lola to precede him in, but he wouldn’t let her turn on any lights. He preferred letting the cheesy neon glow of 23rd Street illuminate the room. It made him feel like he was in an Edward Hopper painting, and that gave him a vague sense of importance. Or maybe that was too strong a word. Maybe it just made him feel connected to something in the mainstream flow of human existence that he normally didn’t.
• • •
Though it was a habit he had long-since shed, Mike had once been a voracious reader. While his three older brothers were wrestling, swimming, shooting hoops, lobbing tennis balls, swinging polo mallets, driving golf balls, rowing crew, playing football and hitting on just about anything female, Mike was mostly sitting in the mahogany-paneled den in Winnetka or on the wide veranda at the back of the summer house in Lake Geneva with a book in his hands.
He read enormous tomes of history and biography; he loved art books filled with pictures of luscious nudes, fertile landscapes and lavish, fruit-filled still lifes; he devoured sports stories and tales of adventure; and he went through mystery novels so quickly his mother once quipped that his reading habit would bankrupt the family. He much preferred living life vicariously through his books to moving out of the den or off the veranda and living it in person.
So, Mike became a little soft, physically and maybe emotionally, too, not that it ever seemed to matter. While his brothers grew bigger, louder and ever more virile, he became rounder, quieter, gentler and more and more engaged in his various worlds of the mind.
And it was all right. Mike was a happy child. No one bothered him about it; no one really troubled him at all. His father was happy to have three sons who shared his own interests–which generally ran to sports and women–and so didn’t take much notice of the fourth, who struck him as a bit odd. His mother rather enjoyed Mike’s company and occasionally engaged him in conversations about what he was reading. His eldest two brothers generally ignored him in a way that was neither good nor bad. They happened to live in the same house and managed to mostly stay out of his way as he stayed out of theirs, and that was that. No harm, no foul, as they would have said.
But it was different with his brother Jeremy. Though he was every bit the tough guy the two older ones were, Jeremy seemed to genuinely enjoy being around Mike, for reasons Mike never fully understood. It’s not as if Jeremy were a reader, mind you, nor did he ever seem to particularly care about what Mike was reading. Maybe it just stemmed from the proximity in age, but he seemed to like sitting with Mike, talking about not much...ordinary stuff. Often not talking at all. Sometimes, they would look for images in clouds or for constellations at night; other times, they would watch old movies or sitcom reruns on TV; once in a while, they would just sit and look at the lake. Once, after Mike had read a book about Indians and wanted to try his hand at beading, Jeremy sat and watched Mike work his little wooden loom for hours on end.
Jeremy was not only Mike’s best friend, he was his only friend. But that was okay. He was just exactly enough.
• • •
Lola settled herself onto the bed and lit a cigarette. After taking a deep drag, she held the pack out to Mike.
“No thanks,” he said.
She put her black-stiletto-clad feet up on the bed and leaned against the worn red cloth headboard, one arm behind her head. She tipped the ash from her cigarette into her hand and blew it off onto the shag rug. “So? Are you ready?”
Mike sat down at the foot of the bed and kicked off his shoes.
“How’d you get into this line of work?” he asked.
“Why? You looking for a job?”
“I’m serious. I want to know about you.” He put a hand on her leg and ran it up and down, feeling the rough fishnet against his palm. He finally ran his hand up to where the fishnet ended and found the garters. With a practiced gesture, he snapped open one, then the other, and pulled the stocking down to her ankle, just above the strap of her shoe. He turned slightly and did the same with the other, then examined Lola’s bare legs.
“Nice,” he said. “So, what was the career path?” He shot her a smile he knew was more leer than grin.
“Do you want to do it or not?” Lola said. “You didn’t pay for all night.”
“I want to talk,” Mike said.
“Jesus,” Lola mumbled, and took another drag on her cigarette, this one so deep and long it made her cough.
“You should give that crap up,” Mike said. “Try drinking instead.”
“Both work for me,” Lola replied, “as long as there are a few drugs thrown in.”
“How’d you get started?”
“We’re not pals, and I’m not going to talk about this.”
“Then tell me how you like it when you do it. What’s it like with guys like me? Is it fun? Is it heady? Is it satisfying? Is it love?”
“It’s none of the first three things, and I have no idea what love is,” she said, “but I’m pretty damn sure it has nothing to do with this.” She crushed the butt of her cigarette out in the palm of her hand and dropped it onto the bedspread. “What’s with you, anyway?”
“Me neither,” he said, ignoring the question. “I don’t know about love either. To be honest, I don’t think it exists. I think it’s a phony construct.”
“Why are we doing this? Why are we talking? I told you up front I didn’t want to be your friend.”
“I know. I’m not asking for that. I just want to sit here with you...and touch you a little...and talk.”
“It’s your dime, pal, but I don’t have all night. Maybe an hour.”
“That’s fine. I just want to tell you one thing.”
“So, tell me and get it over with.”
Lola looked bored and closed her eyes, which annoyed Mike, so he just said what he wanted to say. No prelude, no explanation.
“I killed a man.”
Her eyelids snapped open, and she looked at him full-on for the first time. The hardness in her eyes was suddenly replaced by fear.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I want to talk about it, and you’re here.”
• • •
Mike loved summertime, when the family would leave Winnetka and head for Lake Geneva. His father was mostly only there on weekends, but he, his mother and his brothers would have three glorious months–just about forever–to hang out and do pretty much whatever they wanted. But one year, when Mike was about to turn 12 and summer was about to begin, the pattern changed abruptly.
Jeremy came home from school one day in June, accompanied by his father. His blue uniform was rumpled, he was shaky, actually trembling, and he was very, very quiet.
Mike followed him upstairs to Jeremy’s bedroom. “What’s wrong with you? And what’s Dad doing home so early? Why’d he pick you up at school?”
Jeremy just went into his room and shut the door.
Mike turned to find his mother behind him. “Daddy and Jeremy are going up to Lake Geneva for a day or two.” His mother had apparently followed the boys upstairs. “There’s something they need to talk about.”
Mike would never forget the way Jeremy looked at him as he left for Wisconsin that evening. His eyes were at once dead and piercing. It seemed as if he didn’t know what to say and wouldn’t have been capable of saying it if he had. That was the last time Mike saw him.
• • •
“Why do you look so spooked?” Mike asked Lola, who had pulled her stockings back up, and snapped them into their garters.
“I’m not spooked,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “Here.” She tossed the two hundred-dollar bills onto the bed. “I’ve gotta get going.”
She tried to get up but Mike grabbed her thin arm with his muscular, tattooed one and was pleased to notice she was finally making sustained eye contact with him.
He took the two bills and stuffed them down the front of her camisole, enjoying the feel of her firm silicone implants. “My hour’s not up, and I’m not done talking.” He shoved her back onto the bed.
After a moment, she seemed to regain a small measure of the moxie that had originally attracted him, saying, “Okay, so talk and get it over with.” But her eyes belied the snappy tone of her voice.
“Like I said, I killed a guy. That’s what I want to talk about.”
She looked at him silently, chewing the left side of her lower lip until she got bright red lipstick on the corner of her front tooth. Her discomfort pleased Mike.
“See, my brother died when I was little, and I killed this guy as retribution.”
“Did the guy kill your brother?”
“No,” Mike said, “but the guy’s flaming fag lover might as well have killed him. He messed with my brother when he was a kid, and my brother died because of it. Might have been an accident, might have been suicide, might have been my old man killed him so he wouldn’t have to live with a fag boy. No one knows for sure. Only sure thing is it wouldn’t have happened if Phil-the-fag hadn’t messed with him.”
“So, why didn’t you kill this guy Phil?”
“I thought about it, but figured that would let him off too easy. He killed the only person I really cared about, so I decided to kill the one he cared about. It seemed neat–symmetrical.”
And with that, Mike began once again telling the story of that evening in Central Park, the night he killed Jake. It was maybe the fifteenth or twentieth time he’d told it, and each time had been right in this room to a girl much like Lola.
He wasn’t sure why he needed to tell the story over and over. It was partly that he wanted them all to say he’d done the right thing, the only thing he could have done. The transvestite named Phil had taken his only friend away–and rendered his mother so remote she was virtually absent for the rest of her short life–so he obviously needed to be taught a lesson. Mike insisted that all his listeners agree with him on that–that this was merely justice being meted out–and they always did. He knew it was probably because they were terrified, rather than because they meant it, but it still felt good...the validation.
He also repeated it over and over because he was kind of curious to see how many times he could tell it before someone finally caught up with him. It seemed odd that he’d told like half the whores in Chelsea, and here he was, still out and about, walking the streets a free man.
• • •
Mike didn’t read much after Jeremy’s death. At first, it was a matter of concentration. He wanted nothing more than to lose himself in the plot of an adventure story or the life of an American hero or in a book filled with beautiful pictures, but when it was quiet and he would open the pages of one of his favorite books, the only thing he could think about was Jeremy, and the only thing he could feel was rage. He couldn’t concentrate from one page to the next.
One day, he gave his mother a book of poems in the hope that their music and messages might bring her out of her fog and back to herself, and she thanked him. She kissed the top of his head, told him he was a good boy for attending to her, and stuck the book on a shelf in the den in Winnetka, where it stayed until the house was sold.
So books, he learned, were not the answer.
The only thing that made Mike forget Jeremy was, in a word, sweat. He found that when he pumped iron, ran for miles, tackled his brothers in a football game, duked it out with other boys on a wrestling mat or whacked the hell out of a baseball, his mind would go almost blank. He could release some of the rage and cope. But if he stopped to think, he could not. So he pumped and tackled and punched and whacked his way through middle school and prep school, then made the cut for a semipro baseball team in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
For the three years he was on the team, he was admired for his handsome good looks and for his strength and athleticism, for he had bulked up astonishingly since he stopped reading and had grown vertically, as well, finally topping off at around six foot four. He was also admired for the many tattoos he had gotten in the hope that their heat would sear some of the pain out of him, but it hadn’t.
Mike was also known for his very short fuse. As he had grown bigger and more powerful, more physical and less cerebral, he became used to having his way and angered easily when he didn’t get it. An almost fatal swing at an ump who made what Mike knew to be a bad call finally ended his baseball career, dreadfully prematurely.
His coach, who knew Mike’s story and genuinely liked him, told him he’d pay for Mike to see a shrink. Said it would save his life. Hard to say, maybe it had. The meds had calmed him down enough to move into Manhattan on his own where he took a few bit parts in commercials and even did a little work as a personal trainer, but that was never right. He was no good at one-on-one. He lived mostly off the money his brothers sent from Chicago until his dad died just about a year ago, leaving him pretty well set on his own.
In fact, it was his dad’s death that made Mike decide life was short and it was time to finally get off the meds that had been zapping the pizazz out of him for all these years.
It was time, he figured, to get his own life back...whatever that might be. Within weeks of liberating his body from the stranglehold of the drugs, his mission became crystal clear. It was up to him to avenge Jeremy’s death. It was so obvious.
That he could find Phil Davidson so very easily and that the man lived right here in New York Mike took as the clearest of messages from whatever messengers God or destiny might employ that he had indeed discovered his intended life’s work.
• • •
When he finished telling Lola the story of that night in the park, she stood up cautiously. “Can I go now?”
“If that’s what you’d like,” he said.
“Want your money back?” she said.
“No, hold onto it, babe.” He loved being magnanimous; that’s probably why he was still walking the street. “As they say, you’ve got nothing to sell but your time.”
“You don’t like sex?” she asked.
“I can take it or leave it,” he lied. The truth was, he had never tried it, knowing it was sex that had ultimately been responsible for Jeremy’s death.
Lola pulled her tight black skirt down and smoothed it with her hands. “You’re a most unusual guy.” She flung her blonde hair off her face with a toss of her head. “And you’ve got quite a story.”
Mike grabbed her by the hair and pulled hard, then grabbed her arm and jerked her back down onto the bed. He put his face right up against hers and watched the fear grow in her eyes. “Are you saying you don’t believe me?”
She shook her head. “No, no.... I’m just saying....”
“You said I had ‘quite a story.’ Makes it sound like a lie.’”
“No.... I didn’t mean.... No, I believe you.”
He shoved her so hard she ended up sprawled on the bed with her hair flared out around her head like an aura. “Every goddamn f-ing word of what I told you is the truth. Every one.”
“I believe you. Jesus, I promise I believe you.”
To be continued....
Judy Pomeranz, an Arlington-based freelance writer, critic and lecturer, is élan’s Contributing Editor for arts and books. In 2003, we published her novella, Lies Beneath the Surface.
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