THE THINKER (Short Story by 200motels) Part III

Synopsis - New York, 1986. Jacky hopes to enlist the help of Bogdan in getting him an apartment in Bogdan*s uncle*s apartment building. In order to achieve this, he wants to set up Bogdan with Inch, a female friend of his.


Now the trick was to get Inch interested. Bogdan wasn’t her type at all---Inch only liked guys who had money. She was tall (hence her nickname), blonde, and not too graceful. Her body, which has been spectacular as a teenager, was lately showing signs of compromising with the law of gravity. She had a warm, sentimental nature but was an uncouth, sloppy drunk. By the time you got her drunk enough to do it with you, you didn’t want her anymore. It was conceivable that she might be attracted to Bogdan, though she would have to be pretty heavily anesthetized first. Bogdan could be considered decent-looking enough, I suppose, in an atavistic kind of way.

Inch lived in the building at 888 Eighth Avenue and worked in the coffee shop downstairs. You don’t live in that building by holding a waitressing job, so it was safe to assume that she was serving up something other than club sandwiches on her own time. I went over to see her when I knew she would be working. Depositing my gym bag in an empty booth, I slid in after it. Inch waved at me from behind the lunch counter and brought me a cup of coffee. The dark wraparound sunglasses she was wearing did not fit in with her pink waitress uniform. “I’ll tell you later,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Just come in from the gym?”

“Year, I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop in and say ‘hi’.”

Inch looked around warily to see if she was being watched. She was. Nick, the owner of the place was staring intently at us from inside the kitchen, through the little opening where the dishes are passed through. “Geez,” she squealed petulantly, “I feel like I’m in prison! He watches me like a hawk!”

“What’s with him?”

“It’s ‘cause I have this friend staying over with me for a few days.”

“What friend is that, Inch?”

“This guy Kelly. He’s a comedian who just got in from L.A., so I’m letting him sleep on my couch until he finds a place to stay. I keep telling Nick that nothing is going on with this guy, but he won’t believe it. Look at him, will you?”

I snuck another look in Nick’s direction. He looked like he wanted to come over and throw me out of the restaurant. He sensed that we were discussing him and moved away from the window, embarrassed.

From my point of view Kelly was just as much of a complication as he was for Nick. Nick was married, with a family in Astoria. He only saw Inch more-or-less during working hours (nice set-up he had with her right upstairs from the restaurant. That, I could respect).

Kelly, however, was living right in her apartment, a living, breathing impediment to the budding little romance I was trying to promote between her and Bogdan. Any progress I was to make would be contingent on Kelly’s precipitous departure.

Inch jumped to her feet and went to take an order. I also left the booth and walked over to the soda fountain where Nick was standing, smoking a cigarette. “Nick, baby!” I greeted him. He was middle-size, out of shape, in his forties, with a thick moustache. There was nothing remarkable about him. “Hello, Jackie,” he said, preoccupied.

I made an effort at conversation. “Inch sure looks funny in those wraparound sunglasses.” Nick shot me a disgusted sideways glance and remained silent. It was evident to me that they had had words and that he had smacked her ­ hence the sunglasses.

I decided to be a little bolder. What was he going to do, kick my butt? “Inch tells me that she’s got a guy sleeping on her sofa.”

“I buy her that sofa,” he seethed. “I give her everything she wants. She wants to go to Florida? She goes to Florida. She wants a fur coat? I get her a mink coat. Not fur, mink.”

A mental flash of Nick fucking Inch in her new mink coat momentarily came to me.

“And now she disrespect me. She throw that bum right in front of me. I go up there and find his shit all over the place.

“A comedian,” he growled, demonstrating the New Yorker’s utter and depraved contempt for levity. “Don’t worry,” he promised ruefully, “I fix them both. I kill them. I cut off his balls.”

I almost laughed in his face. “C’mon Nick, you’re a respectable guy, a businessman. What do you want to get your hands dirty on this guy for?

“I know a coupla guys who will remove him from the scene spotlessly. Like a dry cleaner, no muss, no fuss.”

He blew smoke in my face, “How much?”

“Five hundred, and that includes my cut.”

“Make a good job and I give you a thousand. But she don’t know nothing!”

I smiled cheerfully. “That’s understood, Nick.”

Nick regarded me with a distracted air and said paternally, “You’re a good boy, Jacky.”

Frank the Cop was flat on his back on the bench press at the Universal World Bodybuilding Gym in midtown. There looked to be about a thousand pounds of weight on the bar. When I walked up, he gave a look of “Oh God, what does this asshole want?”

“Whaddaya say, Frank!” I stuck out my hand, which he didn’t shake. Frank was a very large, swarthy Italian with a fleshy, passionate face. He had about a sixty-inch chest. His arms were bigger than my legs. Just to make sure you got the point, he was wearing a torn N.Y.P.D. t-shirt about five sizes too small. I’m surprised he wasn’t wearing his freakin’ gun in the gym. “I was just in the neighborhood and I decided to drop in in case you might be here,” I offered.

“Well, now you seen me,” he growled.

“C’mon, Frank, lighten up a little. What happened, happened.” This was referring to a situation where his sister had gone out with a guy I had introduced her to in Queens and they had unfortunately gotten into a car crash. And died.

“Look, if you want, I’ll beat it.”

“No, you can stick around.” He sat up on the bench and offered me his mammoth hand. It was like shaking hands with a catcher’s mitt. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, same stuff…” I surveyed the gym. It was a purely bodybuilding gym. A bunch of serious players sweating and grunting. No kind of neon lights or video monitors. The equipment was all chrome and in excellent condition. Over in the corner a really huge guy about seven feet tall was doing lunges with about 400 pounds on the bar. I admired the calf muscles of a girl doing squats in front of the mirror. “No, really, I was just passing by.”

Frank asked me, “You still working out much?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Sparring too?”

“For sure.”

“You better watch out. You were never good enough to go pro. One of these days you’re gonna get your brains scrambled.”

“You know, it feels good.”

“Haw haw haw, ‘It feels good.’” He laughed malevolently. “What feels good, getting your head smashed in, you dumb schmuck?”

“Frank, even when it hurts at least you know you’re alive, which is more than most people can say. What about you? You look great, Frank. Whaddaya, on steroids?”

“Hey, this is all natural! I haven’t missed a workout in six months.”

“Your wife must be thrilled about that.”

“Haw haw, I always gotta tell her, ‘Not tonight, honey.’ Haw haw haw. Anyway, I promised her when the baby comes I’ll cut it down to three workouts a week.”

“You’re a prince, Frank. Congratulations about the kid. I didn’t know about it until now.”

“How could you know unless you been helpin’ me and I didn’t know it?”

“You gonna name the kid after me, Frank?”

Frank ignored that. He said, “We might build a house in Staten Island or Jersey.”

“That’s great. The city’s no place for kids to grow up today.”

“Not with freaks like you runnin’ around, Jacky,” he joked. Just to show he didn’t mean it, he slipped out his hand and I gave him five.

I said, “It’s funny seeing you like this. I just saw Inch last week.” Frank, Inch and I had all grown up together in the group home.

“Yeah? How is she?” he asked with an air of sincerity.

“Oh, you know Inch. She was wearing a mink coat when I saw her. She’s got an apartment up on Eighth Avenue. I would have to say she’s doing great. But when she took off her sunglasses, she had a black eye and a big bruise on her face.”

Frank frowned. Aside from knowing Inch, this was Serious Police Business. “Did she tell you how she got it?”

“Well, she didn’t come right out and say it, but she’s got this guy staying with her, and I think he gave it to her.”

“No shit!” He stood up and stuck his face in mine. “You know this guy?” he inquired ominously.

“His name’s Kelly Shine. He’s a nightclub comic.”

That really got Frank worked up. New Yorkers hate anything to do with humor. They are on principal dead set against the notion of frivolity, and nothing gets them riled up more than the idea that somebody might be having fun somewhere when their lives are so grim and lacking in imagination. The national bird of New York should be the seagull, who only thinks about eating and stealing the food out of other seagulls’ mouths. When was the last time you saw a seagull laugh? The concept of Inch getting beat up by a worthless, useless, piece of shit comedian got Frank so bent out of shape that his face got all contorted and he started breathing heavy, like a snorting bull enraged by a red flag. “You know where this guy works?” he asked in dead seriousness. So serious that I started to get cold feet, but it was too late now.

“The Yuk Factory on Second Avenue. Lissen, Frank, he’s got a routine about cops that he does.”

“Yeah?” he said, dripping venom.

“Yeah, about how they’re dumber than gorillas. He said we should replace all cops with gorillas. He said, then we’d only have to pay them bananas.”

Being a cop was a holy mission to Frank. Never mind that he used to sell me drugs in high school. We live in an age of instantaneous forgetfulness. I shouldn’t complain. Better he should forget who was feeding him all this bullshit.

It’s like he was reading my mind. “Lissen,” he hissed, “Forget we ever had this conversation, you hear me? If I hear you told me this from anybody, I’m gonna’ come looking for you! There was no mistaking his inflection: the whole emphasis of the sentence was on the word you.

“Told you what, Frank?”

“That’s better. Lissen, you gotta go now. It’s late, and you’re distracting me from my workout. Take it easy,” he turned his back on me and went back to the weight bench.

“Bye, Frank.” I wheeled around and made my way past the straining, steaming bodies to the exit.

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Posted on 3/24/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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