THE BRO-MAGNET (9 page)

Ouch. I just got rejected by someone I never really wanted to go out with in the first place, at least not for anything to do with her personally.

Then I look over at Alice and for once she doesn’t look annoyed with me. On the contrary, she looks like she feels sorry for me.

Pissed. Sorry. Pissed. Sorry. In a world where Alice is mostly just mad at me, I’ll take looking like a pathetic loser if it means she stops being mad for a few minutes.

* * *

Dawn’s gone and I’m getting ready to head off.

“Can I use your…?” I gesture with my hand down the hallway.

“Sure thing,” Billy says, so I go to hit the head before hitting the road.

Then, as Billy and I are saying our final goodbyes, standing at the door trading a few last comments about the Mets, Alice heads down the hallway. I hear a lock click, followed thirty seconds later by…

“
Fucking Johnny!
”

“Oh, shit,” Billy says. “You leave the lid up on the toilet?”

I nod.

“She’s so skinny, her ass gets wet when that happens. You better get out of here while you still can.”

In my mind, I’m thinking in my best bass voice imitation: I’m in the
front row!

Steve Miller called me up the week before.

“You’re nor going to believe this,” he said.

I was on a job at the time, standing on a ladder, cell phone in hand.

“What?” I said. “Your wife wants to paint the dining room a different color for the fourth time?”

“Good one.” He laughed. “You know you’re a very funny guy?”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Katie’s happy enough with the dining room, at least for now. She loves the aqua.”

People always do.

“No,” Steve went on. “That case I told you about? The burglar with a heart of gold?”

“Yeah?”

“I won! I followed your advice to the letter, and I won!”

“Hey, that’s fantastic.”

“Well, the opposing attorney didn’t think so. You should have seen her face!”

“I’ll bet.”

“Anyway, the reason I’m calling is: About that Opening Day game…”

I hadn’t really wanted to go to a game with Steve Miller nor did I want to sacrifice a half day’s work, and I even resisted for a long time, but then I asked myself: Aren’t I my own boss, and isn’t one of the perks of that the ability to say screw work for the day and just go play? Plus, when in my life am I ever going to get to sit in a seat that costs more than my last long-weekend vacation?

So here I am, and I keep trying to pump myself up by telling myself in that bass voice: I’m in the
front row!

Which is inevitably followed by a smaller interior voice saying: Too bad it’s for the fucking Yankees, the World Champs – how annoying is that?

That’s right. Here I am at the home opener – Steve had kept calling it Opening Day but the Yanks were on the road for the season opener so this is just the home opener – at Yankee Stadium, which is another annoying thing. The Mets have to play at Citi Field now but of course the fucking Yankees get to keep the name of their stadium, even after the new stadium opened, even after the corporatization of America. The Yankees always get everything. I hate to be such a girl about things but it’s so unfair.

Yes, I’m sitting here in an eight-hundred-dollar seat at fucking Yankee Stadium on Thursday, April 16, I’m surrounded by a halo of lawyers, and they’re all wearing suits.

Steve had a ticket sent to my home, so I drove in myself and arrived after Steve and his other two guests, which turned out to be two out-of-town lawyers.

“Monte,” the one said, holding out a hand with perfectly manicured fingernails, “Carlo.”

“Um, Danbury,” I responded, figuring it was some sort of weird lawyer greeting as I shook his hand, “Connecticut.”

“No, Jersey,” he said. “I’m from Jersey. Monte Carlo’s my name.”

“That’s pretty funny,” I said.

“Is it?” he said wonderingly.

Then Steve laughed. “Huh. It is. I never thought about it that way.”

The other lawyer’s name turned out to be John John III. I don’t know why people do that to their kids. Giving someone the same first name as their last is bad enough to do once but then to go on to do it for the next two generations? And this guy’ll probably do the same thing to his kid, but this time I was careful not to say anything that might make it sound like I was laughing at someone’s name since Monte Carlo was still looking kind of sensitive.

“We call him JJ Trey,” Steve leaned into me for the whisper.

Whatever.

So now I’m sitting here in the front row, surrounded by my halo of lawyers, they’ve all got their suits on since they came straight from work, ties loosened now, expensive jackets draped across their laps. And what am I wearing?

My usual going-to-the-game uniform: relatively clean T-shirt, jeans, work boots. I left the Mets cap at home. Who says I’m not sensitive to the people around me?

Yes, I’m sitting here, blowing off work on a gorgeous spring day, right in the front row, right behind home plate where I’ve never sat in my life, Steve at my side, Monte Carlo and JJ Trey behind us, and I could care less. Because it is, in the end, only the fucking Yankees.

“What do you want to eat?” Steve asks. “Whatever you want – eat, drink – it’s on the house, comes with the tickets.”

“I’m thinking sushi,” JJ Trey says from behind us, “with an ice-cold Stoli.”

“Something Italian,” Monte Carlo says. “Maybe calamari or a nice risotto? And a Rob Roy.”

Geez, where am I, the ballpark or a restaurant in Manhattan?

“Johnny?” Steve says. “What would you like? Really, anything you want. A porterhouse steak? Shrimp Caesar salad? Maybe a nice bottle of champagne to go with it? Some Veuve Cliquot?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was thinking more like a couple of hot dogs with mustard and a Bud.”

Steve is crestfallen. “I’m not sure if you can get that here.”

Fucking Yankees. Fucking Yankee Stadium.

* * *

It’s the third inning, the score is Who cares? to Who cares? and I decide to take a little walk, see if I can scare up some hot dogs and real beer.

And what do you know? It takes me a while, I have to take the escalator up to the cheap seats and walk halfway around the stadium, but eventually I find what I’m looking for.

As I head back to my seat, coming up behind Steve and Monte Carlo and JJ Trey, for the first time I notice the people sitting to our right, two of whom are women. Both women are wearing business suits, the one right next to our box looking kind of sloppy in hers, while the one a little further down looks crisp and not at all like any woman I’ve ever seen at Shea; I mean Citi Field. She hasn’t even removed the jacket of her suit, despite that it’s turning into a very warm day. Her hair is a pretty auburn color, thick and up in some kind of twist. She happens to turn briefly as I approach and I notice that her skin is like china – I hope she doesn’t burn in this sun – and that her eyes as they meet mine are an incredible shade of blue-green. I also notice that she looks bored out of her skull.

I’m thinking about how pretty and bored she looks, thinking about how eventually every seat in every stadium in the land will one day be filled strictly with bored people who are only there because their companies have season tickets but who have no real love of the game, when my attention is pulled away by the sound of my own name. Problem is, I realize almost immediately, no one’s talking
to
me; they’re talking
about
me. 

“Really?” JJ Trey pops a sushi roll into his mouth, follows it down with a delicate sip of his ice-cold Stoli. “You invited your
house painter
to the game?”

“What’s next,” Monte Carlo says, swirling the swizzle stick in his Rob Roy, “you going to ask your garbage man to the opera?”

I don’t know what I expect when I hear this – that Steve will laugh with them, sell me down the river? That he’ll say inviting me was just some big joke?

But he doesn’t do any of this.

“Come on, guys,” he says, “Johnny’s amazing. He’s really funny.”

“Right.” Monte Carlo snorts. “Like him laughing at my name. The guy’s a real laugh riot.”

“I’m serious,” Steve says. “Not only that, he’s really smart too.”

Now it’s JJ Trey’s turn to snort.

“I’m telling you,” Steve says, “the guy’s like some kind of legal savant.” He casts his eyes to the right, to the two women sitting next to our box, and lowers his voice. “He’s the one who gave me the idea of how to get my last client off. My client was facing some serious time, the prosecutor had a solid case and – ”

Enough of this. It’s nice of Steve to defend me this way, but he shouldn’t have to sell me to these two guys.

I “ahem” loudly, as I pass Monte Carlo and JJ Trey’s seats, resume my seat beside Steve, hot dogs and beer in hand.

“Hey, Johnny.” Monte Carlo taps me on the shoulder. “Steve here says – ”

But he doesn’t get a chance to finish, because just then my cell phone rings. I’m going to ignore it – I’m at a ballgame, after all, even if it is the Yankees – but then I notice people all around us yakking on their cells, and I figure what the hell.

But my hands are full of hot dogs and beer. I look around me for a place to put them as the cell keeps ringing, notice the two women in the box beside ours staring at me.

“You want one?” I say, indicating the hot dogs. The one in the rumpled suit shakes her head like I might be a pervert or something, but Blue-Green Eyes smiles politely as she says, “No, thank you.” There’s something about her voice that’s instantly familiar, but I can’t place it and anyway the phone’s still ringing. I have the longest ring in the world before it’ll switch to voicemail; the long ring is because sometimes when I’m working an exterior and I’m up high on the ladder, I prefer to get down to terra firma before picking up. As I set the hot dogs and beer on the ground, however, I do think about how politely Blue-Green Eyes responded to me. I always think it says a lot about a person, how they treat strangers and people who are dressed inferiorly to them in a social setting.

“Could be work,” I say apologetically to Steve as I flip open the phone.

“Hello?” I say, listen as the caller identifies himself.

Steve nudges me. “Is it work?”

I shush him, speak into the phone, making my voice go all excited. “Are you kidding me? I finally made the team?”

“What team?” Steve says, and I can feel Monte Carlo and JJ Trey lean forward, interested.

“The Mets,” I say, covering the mouthpiece with my hand as I listen to the voice in my ear.

I respond to the voice, “This is fantastic! When do you want me to show up for practice? This may surprise you to hear it, but playing shortstop for the Mets has been my lifelong dream!”

The voice in my ear and I go on for a time, before I finally end the call with, “Looking forward to seeing you next week!”

I snap my phone closed, pleased with myself, retrieve my beer and hot dogs. “You sure you don’t want one?” I say to the women next to me, who are both eyeing me now like, “Who is this guy?”

When they shake their heads, I shrug, take a bite of the first dog.

All around me there’s silence. Well, except for the roar of the crowd. Finally Monte Carlo says from behind, in awe, “You’re going to be playing shortstop for the Mets?”

The laugh comes out of me so abruptly, I practically choke on my dog. “Um, no,” I say.

What is this guy, high?

“You mean that phone call?” I say, and Steve nods. “Oh, that was just a ticket seller. I don’t know how they got my number, but every season they call up with the same routine, ‘We’ve got some exciting opportunities for you this year at Shea.’ Well, now they say Citi Field, which really pisses me off.”

“I know, right?” Steve says.

“Of course by ‘exciting opportunities,’ they mean they have season tickets they want me to buy. Like that’s going to ever happen. I can’t be blowing off work every day. So I just play with them, pretend I don’t understand what they’re talking about, act like I think they’re offering me a contract to play. They keep trying to sell me and I keep acting excited about my new career with the Mets. It goes on like that until I tire the guy out.” I shrug. “The guy today didn’t last too long.”

“That’s pretty funny,” Monte Carlo concedes. “When I get phone solicitors, they just annoy me.”

“Hey,” I say, “you should see me at home when someone calls the wrong number.”

Next to me, I see Blue-Green eyes smile as she watches the Yankees play. I figure it can’t be the Yankees making her smile. It must be my charm. 

JJ Trey taps me on the shoulder. “Steve says you’re some kind of legal savant. Make a case for me.”

What is this guy, high? “About…?”

“Anything. Just make something up. This game’s lousy. I’m bored.”

“OK,” I say, thinking, thinking. I don’t usually get put on the spot like this with abstract cases. It’s more like I only think about it when I’m reading the paper or when Sam’s watching one of her crime shows on MSNBC. But if this guy wants to challenge me, I’ll play.

“Hmm… OK, my
favorite
loophole showed up in a Kansas law a year or two ago.”

“You see what I mean about this guy?” Steve says proudly, loudly. “What kind of
nonlawyer
has a favorite loophole? I don’t even have a favorite loophole!” When he says this, I see Blue-Green Eyes shoot me a sharp look, but I’m so excited to be talking about my favorite loophole that I don’t stop and wonder what it might mean, instead plunging enthusiastically on.

“Like I say, this happened a year or two ago. In an effort to discourage abortions, the state of Kansas created a safe harbor for parents who abandoned their children at any hospital in the state. That may also have included fire departments and places like that – I’m a little hazy about some of the finer details. The interesting part is that the state neglected to clarify when the drop-offs were allowed relative to the age of the child. As a result, crafty parents with difficult teenagers began abandoning their kids at Kansas hospitals. Now, of course it’s generally illegal to abandon a child but because the law was so poorly worded, several teens were abandoned, including some from out of state, until the law was redrafted.”