Ladies' Man (19 page)

At ten of seven the downstairs buzzer rang. I buzzed Donny in and hit the change button on the record player. "A Love Supreme" soundtracked the apartment.

"Hey, ya fuck!" We slapped palms in greeting at the door. Donny's face was death white blotched red from the cold.

"Here you go." He handed me a bottle of Mateus, my sample case and draped his ski jacket on the doorknob of the foyer closet.

"You couldn't forget this?" The case slid from my middle finger to the floor. "Lemme get a hanger."

"Nan, nan, c'mon, c'mon." He pushed me down the foyer into the living room.

"I don't have brandy. You want a Scotch?"

"Anything, man." He rubbed his hands and shivered while checking out my living room. "Nice, nice, very nice. Whata you pay here, three?"

"Two seventy-five." I poured a Chivas. "Water?"

"A little. Last week I had to check out this guy's apartment, over one block on seventy-sixth? He had the corner roof apartment, nice view. His ceiling: saved in during a rainstorm and he got a concussion from falling plaster. Also, the guy had a five-thousand-dollar stamp collection ruined. Very nice." He admired the kitchen.

I showed
him
the bedroom, and he immediately noticed the paint blisters on the ceiling.

"When you get painted last?"

"Six months ago."

"Cocksuckers. You can get another paint job. They used a shit grade of paint. What they give you, one coat or two?"

"Hey, Donny, I'm not a building inspector. Relax, hah? Drink your drink."

"And I hate that fucking job, too, Kenny, that's the funny thing about it."

"C'mon, let's just sit down for a while."

We sat at the dinner table and sipped our Scotches. "Kenny, Kenny, Kenny," he droned.

"Donny, Donny, Donny."

"Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit," he responded, and we clinked glasses.

"Lemme put on the chicken." I turned on the oven, ripped open the broccoli package and slipped the frozen rectangle of greens into a wide pot.

"Fuckin' Candyman, huh?" I shook my head. "Candy's Candy." Donny drained his drink. "He made me feel like shit yesterday."

"Ah, he does that to me all the time." He refilled his glass two fingers.

"So why do you run with him?"

Donny shrugged. "I don't run with him that much.
Sometimes I stop in, that's all." He looked embarrassed.

"Lemme ask you something, Donny." I squinted to signify a bottom-line question coming up. "You think he's right about the kids an' all?"

Donny hunched his shoulders and winced. "I swear, I don't know, Kenny, I don't know anything anymore."

"Well, different strokes, right?" C'mon, Donny, help me out here.

"I guess." He rubbed his mouth distractedly. He was a big goddamn support.

"So there's
your
old lady, Kenny?"

My got sank. "She's visiting some people." I wanted to crack to him, but it felt too painful right then.

"She nice? You got any pictures?"

"You know something, I don't think I do."

Coltrane clicked off. Donny got up. "You mind if I find something?" He motioned to the records in my wall unit.

"Be my guest." I started slipping into a trip around La Donna. La Donna seemed like such a beautiful and unique name.

"Play this!" Donny sat cross-legged on the floor facing the wall unit. He held up my
Murray the K's Boss Golden Gassers
—
1962
. I joined him on the floor. The Scotch gave my nose a little glow like a two-watt bulb. "Soldier Boy! Whew! Do you fuckin' remember that?"

"I haven't heard this album since high school."

"It'll probably destroy your system. Whata you got here?" He twisted around, searching my walls for speakers.

"JBL decades, a Sansui seven seventy-one and a Garrard box."

"What that run you, six?"

"Eight." I scanned the songs on the album. "Hey!" I pointed to a title.

"'Sixteen Candles.'" He frowned, then lit up. "Oh ho!"

"Remember that?" I raised my chin and winked.

"Barbara Abbadabba."

"Barbara Abbadando," I corrected with significance.

"She fuckin'
took
'Sixteen Candles,' remember?"

"Well, she took two candles that are sittin' here right now!" We slapped palms again.

"Bad Barbara." I put the golden oldies album on, but it was so scratched I took it right off.

Legend had it that this chick in the projects, Barbara Abbadando, would fuck anybody in high school if they got her alone in a room and played "Sixteen Candles" for her. I know
I
never fucked her and I doubted that Donny did either.

"No offense, Kenny, but I hate jazz."

"I know what
you
like." I got to my feet and opened La-Donna's closet While trying not to notice her boots and sheet music, I grabbed two record boxes from the hat shelf, then kicked the door closed. "Into the vault!"

Donny opened the boxes, glowing with reverence like a kid being handed a complete set of baseball cards.

He gingerly extracted a half-dozen old 45s, looping his finger through the holes. "You saved yours, hah?" His voice was a hush.

"Every one." It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

"Aw shit! 'Wooly Bully'! You remember fuckin' Wooly Bully'!" He laughed.

"First time I heard 'Wooly Bully,' Donny, I almost ruined my father's car. You remember my old man's Fairlane Five hundred? I had Diane Fishman in the front seat and we were parked over the Safeway on that hill by Burke Avenue. I was on top of her, grinding. I had the motor off but I left the radio on for atmosphere. When 'Wooly Bully' came on I went batshit. I almost humped her to death. Ten minutes later I go to start the car, it won't start." I shrugged. "Plus! It stinks like gasoline. You know what happened? When I was humping her I had my foot on the accelerator for leverage, you know, and every time"—I rocked back and forth on my ass, grinding my hips—"every time like that, I flooded the engine."

"Oh ho! 'My Girl'! Whata fuckin' song! You got a disc, Kenny?"

-. We put it on, singing along and I felt the years slip by my closed eyes, as if I could lose my present life in the sweetest of sweet amnesias…

"Nice, right?" I smiled.

"You know who used to go berserk over 'My Girl'? Maynard."

"Maynard? I thought he only, dug like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger and Library of Congress Chain Gang recordings."

"Nah." Donny chuckled. "That was an act. Maynard knew everybody expected him to be like that, protest and shit, but he dug the same stuff you did. He just did it privately because he didn't want to blow his image. Maynard was a complicated dude. Hey!" Donny brightened, holding a record to my face; " 'Walk Like a Man'—who's that?" he quizzed me.

"Oh." I snapped my fingers in frustration. "I got the face, I got the face."

"Mikey," he hinted.

"Mikey Feeny!" I blurted. One summer night about thirty guys hanging out in the park rechristened themselves with the title of a rock 'n' roll song they particularly identified with. If the title was too long the guy just did a variation of the first word. Michael Feeny chose "Walk Like a Man," so he was dubbed Walker. In most cases those names stuck only until school started again.

"You remember your name, Donny?"

"Shit yeah, Gypsy. 'The Gypsy Cried.' You were Speedoo, right?"

"You got it. Remember Candy's?"

"Fuckin'
Duke
, right?" He laughed. '"Duke of Earl.'"

"Duke of Shit."

We sat in silence, nodding and chuckling. On the one hand I could have just kept rifling and dredging up names and memories all night. On the other hand I started feeling tired. Not sleep tired, more like slack-jawed. That part of me couldn't riff anymore, refused to do the stroll down memory lane.

"Hmph," Donny snickered, staring at my shoes, "Duke of Shit."

I could sense him knotting up with the silence. His eyes were all over the place but never more than three feet off the ground. I could have helped him out, said something funny, but I was absorbed in watching his desperation, my desperation. His brain was cooking for a riff. The fact that I wasn't doing the same almost made me feel as though I had floated out of my body and was watching both of us. Ever since I was a kid I always felt the need to explode into a ball of entertainment whenever I was with a group of people. When I was ten I remember being over at Donny's house watching TV with his parents and seeing him erupt into compulsive joke after joke. Even though I couldn't put it into words I knew exactly what was going on in his head even then. If we were at my house I would have done the same.

"Hey, did you know Mikey's brother Ernest?" he blurted, cocking his head at me.

"Nah, I never ran with Mikey." I felt sorry for both of us.

"Oh, so you don't know Ernest, his sister Linda, none a them?"

"Nope."

"So you never heard about that game between Our Lady of Sorrows and Sacred Cross?"

"What game?"

"I'm surprised you never heard of it." He handed me "Shout" and "Pretty Little Angel Eyes."

"See, Ernest, Mikey's brother, no wait, lemme backtrack. Mikey had a sister, Linda. She used to blow the goddamn phonebook, both the white pages
and
the yellow pages. I mean, if you went up to the roof of her building
now
there's probably
still
two permanent kneecap depressions in the gravel. So, anyways, the thing was, every time Ernest heard about his sister blowin' some guy he went berserk, tracked the guy down and beat the poor guy to shit. You
sure
you didn't know Ernest Feeny?" He became more relaxed.

"Hey, man, I hardly remember Mikey."

"Well, you remember how tough Mikey was, right? Well, fuckin' Ernest used to destroy Mikey, just as a workout before breakfast. That's why Mikey was so mean. Anyway, so Linda would give head' then Ernest would break head. In the spring of nineteen sixty, we were in junior high, you and I, Linda starts running with Freddy Victor, who played ball for Sacred Cross. This guy was hip to Ernest but he figures if he stays in his neighborhood he's safe. So Linda always went over to
his
house because she didn't want her brother beating on him."

"Where'd he live?"

"All the way over in Marble Hill, and Ernest knew what was going down, but he knew if he started something in Marble Hill it would be like GI Joe stepping into a Vietcong stronghold and saying, 'Who's bad here!' Okay? So he was very frustrated. Anyway, like I said, Freddy was on the baseball team at Sacred Gross and that year Sacred Cross won their division. Now, Ernest, he pitched for Our Lady of Sorrows, in a different division. I mean when he wasn't stomping on Linda's blowjobees. That year, Our Lady of Sorrows won
their
division title, okay? Of course there had to be a playoff between the two divisions to see who represented the Bronx and played whoever the Catholic school champs were gonna be in
Manhattan
, right? Big game in Yankee Stadium. Bronx versus Manhattan, dinner with the mayor, the whole thing."

"Ernie is pitching. Freddy is scared because he has got to stand up there against Ernest. And fucking Ernest had a fast ball; his catcher, Frank Mazza, had to soak his hand in brine and tape sponges to his palm. I mean Ernest had a smoker. You used to get up there to bat, next thing you knew somebody had to hand you a -school newspaper so you could read that you were struck out. So Freddy's fucking scared, and he is a good hitter too, but he didn't know what was going on in crazy Ernie's brain, and he felt very vulnerable. The first two times he gets up Ernie is not only
not
using his fast ball, but he's feeding them over the plate so nicely that the ball was coming in, it should have had a knife and fork on either side of it. Freddy hits a double, then a triple. Ernie's smoking out everybody else though, and by the bottom of the ninth, the score is one up. Ernie walks two guys, strikes out a guy, gives up a single, strikes out another guy. Now that is what you call your classic baseball drama situation. Score's one up, bottom of the ninth, two out, bases loaded. And who do you think comes up to bat? Freddy Victor. Freddy is having illusions of Bobby Thomson. He's got the golden bat that day and he's not too worried about Ernie anymore. As a matter of fact, he's thinking maybe Ernie is a little worried about
him
, you know? So… he's up there. Ernie runs him to a three-and-two count. Okay, you got the tension mounting, the drum roll in the background. Ernie takes off his cap, just stands there, not winding up. Just glaring at Freddy for a long time, and then suddenly he
rockets
this smoking fireball down the lane.
Boom it
hits Freddy right in the fucking chest! Freddy gets blown back right into the umpire and -collapses. He's dead. The ball smashed a rib, the rib punctured the heart. But dig! Here's the irony. Sacred Cross, Freddy's team, wins the game! Because even though he was killed, he was hit by a pitch, so he
automatically
advanced to first, the bases were loaded, so a run came in. Sacred Cross wins, two to one."

We stared at each other for a whole minute. A scratchy 45 was stuck on "Kick mah heels up an'," "Kick mah heels up an'," "Kick mah heels up an'."

"What a huge steaming pile of bullshit," I said softly, shaking my head in amazement.

"I know, but it's a great story, ain't it? I love tellin' stories about the neighborhood." Donny reached over and removed the needle from the record.

I wanted to tell Donny he didn't have to entertain me, but I thought, who the hell am I to tell anybody to lighten up on rifling? I didn't know how to tell him' without incriminating myself and getting into a whole heavy thing about our heads, and frankly I would have rather riffed.

"Lemme check the chicken." I got up. The chicken wasn't ready yet.

"Did Mikey really have a brother and sister?" I squatted back down. I bet the old merchant marine sat around the Poseidon Club telling bullshit sea stories with the boys just like us. The only difference was he was pushing seventy-five and Donny and me were thirty.

Donny shrugged and pulled a Brasil Danneman cigar tin from his breast pocket. He flipped it open with his thumb and extended it to me. "Before-dinner mint?"