Feelers (4 page)

SOME MEN SEE THE ACT
of love as baseball, where there are bases to be rounded in a hurry to reach home.

For me, the act of love is like
el toreo
, or bullfighting. For those who have not seen a bullfight, it is important to note that like baseball, it has four stages, or
tercios
, required for scoring. In the first stage, the matador confronts the bull and observes its behavior to see how it reacts to the cape. In the second, lancers enter and maneuver so that they can stab the bull in the neck to partially disarm the beast, lower its blood pressure so that it can be conquered. In the third, the
banderillas
enter the ring with barbed sticks with which they impale the flanks of the animal to further break its resolve. In the fourth, the matador enters alone, with just his cape and sword. He tempts the bull with the cape, making it charge repeatedly. When the bull is sufficiently weakened, the matador outmaneuvers the bull, thrusts his sword, and the animal succumbs. I know all this because I TiVo
toreo
from one of the cable channels.

I trust I do not have to explain how
toreo
is like the act of seduction and sex. Or why it is superior to dashing for the bases and perhaps being tagged out.

And there is something about a naked exhausted woman sprawled on your bed that is not too unlike a conquered animal. Yes? Well, it is your misfortune as an ordained man not to know, but I ask that you trust me on this.

Her name was Fanny, and she worked at Tangles, a hair salon down the boulevard about fifteen blocks. I, of course, was fascinated by this profession, which I have always respected and admired. Well, at least from the moment she told me she was a hairdresser.

In the initial stages of seduction, it is important to introduce humor. Making a girl laugh loosens her up. As she was brunette, I thought a blonde joke might be good, and I happened to know one that involved a hairdresser.

A blonde, she walks into Tangles, and Fanny asks: “What would you like done today?”

The blonde says to Fanny: “I wanna to get my hair permed.”

Fanny says: “Well, you must remove those headphones first.” The blonde was wearing those white earphones everybody wears these days
.

“But I can’t! My parents said that if I
ever
take them off, I’ll die!” the blonde answers
.

Fanny says: “I am going to get the stuff for the perm, and when I return you must have the earphones removed so I can do the perm.”

Fanny comes back into the room and finds that the blonde is on the floor—flat on her back! Quickly, Fanny takes the poor girl’s pulse, and there is none. Then Fanny tries to revive her, but it is no good. That’s when Fanny picks up the earphones. There is still sound coming from them, and so Fanny listens and hears a recorded voice:

“Breathe in, Breathe out, Breathe in, Breathe out, Breathe in, Breathe out.”

This joke went over very well indeed, enough so that the timing
was right to ask her if she would like to go somewhere else. I was not entirely comfortable working on Fanny with an audience of people I know. Frog was making the occasional groan over the obviousness of my attentions. But why keep my intentions secret? This was no time for subtleties. You must engage the woman, flatter her, throw a little money around.

The classy places to drink in outer Brooklyn tend to be clubs, all with slinky names like Enigma or Mystique or Rendezvous, but they were not yet open at that time of day. This means you must go to a restaurant to find a bar without deadbeats like Buddy and Mim and Frog and Hugo and Pete and Slim Jim hanging around. Yes, they are my friends. Well, more like coworkers, who are not usually friends, more like perpetual acquaintances. Either way, let’s face it: You do not want friends or coworker acquaintances around when you are working a girl. Why? Because they suddenly cease to become friends and acquaintances and will almost always do things to trip you up or somehow make you look foolish. They think it is funny to see you fail with a woman. I do not know why, Father, but this is true.

As soon as I knew we were going to a restaurant bar, I knew this would mean that I would have to spring for dinner to make my conquest. But what was I thinking? Old habits, they say, live a long time. Sitting on eight hundred grand, I could take four girls to dinner all at once at the nicest place around and not think twice. So I suggested heading down to Grinaldo’s Lobster Pot, which is on the creek near the marina.

So we ate lobsters and drank champagne. Then we went disco dancing at Octavio. Then we went back to my place and opened a bottle of cold duck, and the matador took to the arena with just his cape and sword for the finale.

They say a man is at his best with women when he is confident.

With eight hundred grand in my pocket, I was very, very confident.

I ASK YOU NOT TO
give me a hard time about playing gypsy again, Father Gomez. It is the only way I know how to tell you this story so that you understand everything that happened. I am a romantic and therefore have certain privileges, and one of them is to imagine freely. If you just read the newspaper clippings you would not get the whole story, and it is much more entertaining to paint the picture for you rather than describe painting the picture. Yes?

So I must tell you about another player in this drama, one behind the curtain that I could not as yet see, so I can only imagine how he prepared to enter the stage that was my life.

What do retired people do, anyway? Most do not seem to know what to do, and so they do not do much at all. Maybe they sit on a park bench feeding pigeons, or playing cards with other old people with nothing to do, or maybe they watch television. Mostly I think they do the last one, because the houses I clean always have well-worn furniture right in front of the TV while reading chairs and other furniture seem not to have been used at all except on Easter Sunday when people came to visit.

The advertisers on television show us happy old couples walking
hand in hand on the beach with a golden retriever bounding along beside them. They show them playing golf, in tracksuits exercising, and sailing boats. Is it just me, or is it Brooklyn? I never see any old people like this in real life. Maybe in California they are like this, I do not know.

Then again, you have someone like Charlie Binder, a small man with short wiry ginger hair like you find on certain orange terriers, I forget which ones. I mean that—it was not just on his head, you could see it went down his neck and came spilling out at his chest and cascaded down under his shorts, carpeting his legs all the way down to his sandals. There was no mistaking he was obsessed with sailing and sailboats. The windbreaker, shorts, deck shoes, and nautical sport shirt—what I call sailing togs—gave it away.

Yet he was one of those people who look angry all the time, with wisps of hair shooting out their ears like jets of steam. This effect was probably because he had a heavy brow and a forthright manner from thirty years on the force, the last twenty as a detective in Brooklyn. He had been shot once in the leg, stabbed once in the ear, and hit once by a car in the line of duty. So he figured that was enough and retired at fifty-two, and it had been ten years since then, so he was not that old. His wife had died from smoking a few years back, and that hardship and the void it left in his life made him feel older. That is when he bought a big-ass vintage sailboat to fill his life. I understand it was almost a yacht or something, the kind you have to wear white pants and a blue blazer to look right owning it. So this project of fixing up this giant boat meant he spent much of his time at the marina scraping and sanding his sailboat in dry dock, his retirement project. How this sort of drudgery is supposed to be fun I do not
know. It is like buying a busted TV and spending years fixing it so you can finally watch it.

For reasons you will soon understand, Charlie was under the impression that a windfall was coming, and had been for years, which is why he bought a big-ass vintage boat that he planned to sail around the world or something in search of his tropical paradise. Which is also why the name on the back of the boat read
Windfall
.

Perhaps Charlie looked angry because he felt angry. As I have heard people say about fixing up boats, the boat owns you, you do not own the boat, and many in this predicament are not happy about this arrangement. In this case, it was even worse than that. The boat project had cost him a fortune between the teak repairs, rigging, hull rot, and new masts, much of which had to be specially fabricated. It would have been cheaper to buy a new boat, or build one from scratch, but once you start investing money in something like this, it takes on a life of its own—and like a life, it is filled with debt. Charlie owed almost two hundred thousand dollars, much of which he was having great difficulty paying while still needing to buy more things for his boat. His phone mailbox was constantly filled with calls from debtors and suppliers looking for their money.

So even as the matador was awakening to find the slain bull in bed beside him, Charlie was sanding the hull of his boat. His phone rang.

Charlie had to put down the sander and put on his reading glasses to look at his cell phone and see who it was. His eyes peered at the number suspiciously. Was this someone he owed money? Or his daughter? She was always calling to make sure he took his heart medicine, which he did, sometimes.

By the time Charlie had studied the number, he had missed the call, so he found the appropriate button and called his messages. He listened and then called the person back.

“AJ, this is Charlie. You called me?”

“Charlie! It’s AJ. Howareyah? How’s the boat?”

Charlie scanned the hull of his sailboat before answering. Was that dark spot more rot?

“Coming along. Almost finished. How’s Heather and the twins?”

“Good. Heather is still with the judo—I think she could beat the crap outta me, you know? And the kids, well, you know kids. Whadda they know, am I right? Nothing. Feh. Let ’em make their own mistakes, I say.”

“Uh huhn.” Charlie was getting a little tingly. He got that way every time AJ called over the last fifteen years, but now especially, because it had been fifteen years.

“But I called you this morning to tell you he’s out.”

“Out?”

“That’s right, I just heard. Yesterday. Last they saw him was going into the subway in Queens.”

Some people who retire are waiting for death, while others are pretending it isn’t just around the corner.

Charlie? He was waiting for Danny to get out of prison.

I KNOW YOU CANNOT WAIT
to see what happens in my bed when the bull awakens next to the matador. Then again, maybe you can. Anyway, I must elaborate more on Danny so you understand what happens later.

Danny found his way into the gang that knocked over the Atlas armored car almost by accident. As his good manners suggested, he was as clean a Brooklyn kid as you could hope for. His parents: devout, hardworking, loving. His grandparents: always around and involved with the grandkids, helping put them on the straight and narrow, aimed at a virtuous and happy life. Jesus, I only half wish I had been brought up like that, maybe I would have even gone to college—which is where Danny was headed. In fact he had been accepted into Yale and was going to become a lawyer. No shit.

You have to understand about Brooklyn and college. It is not that a lot of kids here do not go to college when they graduate from high school. It is more a matter of what college and for how long. There are a lot of fine institutions of higher learning in Brooklyn. Well, not a lot, really, but some anyway, and there are also a lot of vocational schools. When someone here says they are
going to college, it sounds lofty, but often it only means that they are in some sort of crappy half-assed two-year college. Often the next time you talk to them they have dropped out and are enrolled in a vocational school. And often the next time after that you see them they are working for their uncle at his ware house or delivering pizza because their girlfriend is pregnant and they need money. Well, that is what I see around East Brooklyn, anyway. Maybe it is not that way out west in Brooklyn Heights, or in California.

So Danny was the shining star of his family, bound for glory in Connecticut, where he would no doubt wear ascots and play polo and go sailing and do all sorts of things unimaginable here in Brooklyn. Going to a place like Yale was like going to the moon, like the Brooklyn laws of physics did not apply and you were lighter than air in New Haven.

Fate is a bitch, they say. Which was exactly the case for Danny; fate took the form of a manipulative woman. This often happens just as a man is on the verge of success. I think this is because a shrewd and calculating woman senses a man’s potential and wants to cash in on it, so she puts the hooks in him. Danny grew up in the same neighborhood with Delores, a wild redhead, who came from a family of wild redheads who were always in trouble. They lived on the same block as his Uncle Cuddy. Danny’s girlfriend had just dumped him, and Delores swooped in when he was weak. You can see where this is going—she knew her four brothers were doing the holdup and wanted a piece of the money herself but not the risk. So she gets Danny to participate, and in the safest possible role, as the driver.

It sounds impossible that Danny—who was headed to the moon—could veer so wildly in the wrong direction and crash-land in Sing Sing. Ah, but there are two very different kinds of love.
There is the good love that endures and makes people happy for life. Then there is the bad love, the one that burns hot and insatiable, consuming your soul in its flames. Such was Danny’s unhappy fate.

One of the gang’s neighbors was an Atlas Security guard in the truck, the one who became the inside man. On the selected day, the gang of redheads and Danny were waiting for it in the Path-mark parking lot. The plan was to box the truck in as it was driving up one of the lanes of parked cars. One car would pull out in front, the other in back. From between cars, others of the gang would rush forward and douse the truck in gasoline and set it on fire, then wait for the occupants to exit to keep from being burned alive.