With a Little Luck: A Novel (13 page)

They just don’t get that I’m her best friend and there’s no need to read me my rights. I try to tell them as much. “Well,” I say. “You can tell her it’s me and—Oh! Ouch!”

They’re actually putting handcuffs on me. This is new.

“Please step out of the apartment, ma’am.” It’s Officer Ma’am who says this, and Officer McFeely guides me out into the hallway and then keeps me facing the wall.

“Do you have ID?” McFeely asks.

“Yes,” I say. “In my bag, in there on the floor.”

Officer Ma’am goes to collect my bag and get my ID while McFeely stays with me. Once Ma’am has my wallet, he takes off in the elevator.

“Where is he going with my ID?” I ask.

McFeely ignores me.

“I was just painting my friend’s apartment. Is house-painting a crime?”

“No, but breaking and entering is,” he says.

“Berry!”
shouts Natalie, when she exits the elevator with Officer Ma’am. “Yes, I know her.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“What the hell, Berry? Why didn’t you tell me you were heading over?”

Natalie is not amused. “I came home and heard noises in my apartment. I thought I was being robbed! Or about to be raped.”

“Neither,” I say. “See? Lucky you!”

“What were you doing?” she asks.

“I was painting,” I say. “And I finished. And
you’re welcome
. You have all white walls again now, and your place will not look crazy when the interviewers come tomorrow.”

Natalie shakes her head and crosses her arms in front of her chest. “No, I’m looking at the only crazy around here,” she says.

“Ladies, we’re going to need to run checks on you both, so if you could accompany us back downstairs,” McFeely says.

“Checks for what?” Natalie says.

“Warrants … missing persons … wanted persons,” he says. “We’re required by law.”

“So help me God, Berry, if I have some parking ticket warrant and I get arrested now because of you I will kill you.”

“I’ll have to make sure they put us in different cells, then.”

The two officers guide us downstairs and put us where they can maintain a visual while they sit in the car and run us through their system. The handcuffs are still on me, and they’re uncomfortable, to say the least. I have no idea how people willingly use these things during sex, but please continue to count me out.

Despite the fact that I feel a little bit like we’re in an episode of
I Love Lucy
, Natalie is fuming.

“I’m sorry,” I say, quietly. “I really was just trying to help you. I guess I had some extra energy after my disastrous weekend and I tried to channel it into preventing you from tempting the Bad Luck Gods, since they’ve been causing such havoc with me lately. At least where men are involved.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” I say again. “It was stupid.”

“It’s okay,” she finally says. “I know you meant well.”

“I did. And now the place is ready for your close-up. I even tidied up for you.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” she says. “The tidying. We know you didn’t have to do the painting.”

“I just wanted you to have a good interview.”

“Thank you,” she says. “You are a lunatic. But I know you meant well.”

“Okay, ladies,” Officer Ma’am says. “You’re both clear.” McFeely uncuffs me and walks back to the car.

“Sorry for the confusion,” I say. Neither cop responds. “And feel free to never call me ma’am again,” I add under my breath.

I imagine I hear McFeely say “whack jobs” under his breath, but I know that’s impossible because he’s here to serve and protect, not denigrate.

Natalie and I walk back upstairs so I can get my bag, and I apologize about seventeen more times. Finally, when I’m sure she’s not angry, I leave. But I call her on the way home just to make sure.

If there’s one more thing you should know about me, it’s this: I tell it like it is. Always. Sometimes, that makes things uncomfortable. Sometimes, it’s made me unpopular. But for the most part it’s what’s made me
me
.

So when I’m walking into work on a warm Tuesday evening and there are a dozen or so guys camped out in front of our building to watch contestants sign up for Daryl and Jed’s “Best Chest in the West” contest and one of them shouts, “Show us your tits!” my reaction is slightly less classy than perhaps I’d have wanted. “If I wanted to show my tits I’d work in TV, not radio,” I say, which gets a laugh from some and encouragement from others. All of which I
ignore. When your nickname at puberty was “The Young and the Breastless,” you tend to be sensitive about these sorts of things. Granted, I grew into myself eventually. Or, rather, they grew out of myself, but when you come from humble beginnings such as those, you don’t soon forget.

I walk past the long line of girls who are signing up and take note of their buckled boots, multiple tattoos and piercings. I’d say the girls range in age from about eighteen to thirty-five, with the exception of one woman standing in line who, I’m certain, is confused about where she is. She looks to be at least eighty-five years old—possibly older—and there’s no way she’s in line to show her boobs. I see more scalp on her head than hair, and her husband or companion is in a wheelchair for chrissakes. No, she is definitely not here to sign up for the contest.

My wanting to save her the trouble of waiting unnecessarily in the long line and possibly being embarrassed by the mere suggestion of her entering a wet T-shirt contest compels me to walk over to her.

“Hi, excuse me,” I say, but she doesn’t answer. Hearing-impaired, perhaps. I speak up again, this time tapping her gently on the shoulder, feeling her fragile bones so thinly covered by translucent skin. “Hello?”

Startled, she turns to see who touched her. “Yes?”

“Hi,” I say. “Can I help you find … something?”

“Er … I don’t think so,” she says, sneering—yes, sneering—as she looks me up and down.

“I work here at the station,” I say. “My name is Berry, and, well, it’s just this line is for a contest that they’re having on our morning show tomorrow. Daryl and Jed.”

She just stares at me uncomfortably.

So I go on. “This line you’re standing in is for a … silly contest.”

“Get to your point, missy,” she says, baring teeth, sounding not so much like the sweet grandmother who knits you a quilt or bakes you cookies but like the one you’ll have nightmares about tonight. And by “you” I mean “me.”

They say no good deed goes unpunished, but I’ve already started this, so I keep going.

“Ma’am,” I say, conjuring my least favorite word for the occasion. “This line is for a wet T-shirt contest.”

“I know what the line’s for, you nosy
broad
. Why don’t you mind your own damn business?”

At this point, Grandpa comes wheeling over in his chair and slides to a sideways stop right beside me, almost as if he’s on ice skates.

“You got a problem?” he asks, chin jutted forward and up.

“No, sir,” I say. “I was just trying to be helpful.”

He gestures to his wife. “There some kinda age cutoff on this contest?”

“Well, no … I don’t think so, no …” I say, stumbling for the right words, and my balance.
Are they serious?

“You don’t think Mama has nice boobs? I’ll bet she has better boobs than anyone else in this line.” He looks me up and down. “Definitely better than yours.”

“Hey—I’m sure you’re right,” I say, backing away slowly. “I’m really sorry. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“Ageist!” he says. And then says it again, louder, “
Ageist!
You hate the elderly!” He gets more and more agitated and starts to point at me. “She hates the elderly!”

“Sir,” I say, now walking toward him, trying to calm him. Christ, I don’t want him to have a heart attack or something. “I don’t hate the elderly. I love the elderly. Love. I hope to be an elderly … person … someday.”

“Mama,” he says, as he turns to his wife. “Show her what you got.”

I raise my hands up before me. “That’s not necessary. Really.”

But Mama doesn’t listen to me. She raises up her shirt, exposing her breasts, and I quickly look away.

“Look at Mama,” he insists.

“Sir, I don’t want to look at your wife’s breasts. Ma’am, please pull your shirt down, there’s no need for this—”

Now I sound like Officer Ma’am. I’m ma’am-ing her. Which makes me feel even worse, because I know how crappy it feels to be ma’am-ed.

“Look at ’em!” Wheelchair Willie says, more forcefully.

How has this happened? How did a gesture to help a sweet old lady become an assault on my eyes? Is this not a sexual assault, if we’re really going to get technical about it? This woman is flashing me. Okay, so maybe it’s not assault. It’s certainly indecent. How do I make it stop? By looking?

“Fine,” I say, putting my hands on my hips to brace myself.

Her breasts hang well below her belly button. The skin is stretched and almost pulling, and the majority of them seem hollow, until you get to the bottom, where the rest of them are.

“Wow,” I say. “I’ve never seen a pair like that before.”

“Told you,” Grandpa says.

She shakes them at me, and her husband lights up like a Christmas tree.

“That’s it, Mama,” he says. “Shake it!”

The other girls in line start egging her on and cheering. It’s becoming a bit of a situation, and I don’t want to be held responsible for any part of it.

“Okay,” I say, in a higher pitch than usual, trying to signify that “show and tell” is over. “Thank you for sharing them with me. I
have to go to work now, but I wish you the best of luck in the contest.”

I take off so fast that if my life were a cartoon you’d see my legs in hyper-speed as I try to get the hell away from them and into the elevator.

And as I watch the floors light up as I pass, I wonder, in the grand scheme of my life, why was it written somewhere that I would need to experience that?

My office is full of years of promo kitsch that I’ve collected. Some is from my tenure, and some has been passed down from friends or co-workers. You get to know people at record labels when you work in radio, and they are forever sending you “stuff” to promote their artists. Less so in the past couple years, as it seems we are in the late Cretaceous period of the record label, but I definitely have an odd collection, including some things that could even be considered museum-worthy, or at the very least Hard Rock Cafe–worthy.

Things as small as a signature Def Leppard guitar pick, to a train whistle from the House of Cash and signed by Johnny Cash himself, to a guitar played by Stone Gossard during Pearl Jam’s unplugged session, to the actual angel wings from R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” video.

But my prize possession is a Coolio head. It belonged to Tommy Boy records—apparently, in Coolio’s heyday they had a life-size animatronic Coolio in their lobby. As Coolio’s career disintegrated, so did animatronic Coolio, until eventually all that was left was the head, sitting atop one of the exec’s desks, the mangled, broken-down body shoved in a closet. The head is complete with dreadlocks and eyes that moved back and forth—when animated. It was
incredibly lifelike, and once I saw it I couldn’t let it go. I needed it to be part of my collection. I basically harassed the entire staff of Tommy Boy for months until I finally broke them. Now the head is mine. At certain times of the day Coolio looks almost as placid and wise as a Buddha. Most other times of the day he just frightens me.

Safe and sound in the eclectic mess that is my office, I scan the gossip sites to see if there’s anything breaking that I’ll need to cover or make fun of. It’s sad that I even look at this stuff, but it’s what our zeitgeist is these days so it can’t be avoided. There’s nothing terribly exciting, so I decide to walk into our pathetic kitchen to see if anyone’s left something out for the scavengers to nibble on. Every now and then, there will be some event in-house or some label that sends over doughnuts and you can score something yummy. But usually you’re stuck with the downstairs vending machine.

When I turn the corner into our kitchen, I see a rear end I’m not sure I recognize from our floor poking out of our refrigerator. I take a few quiet steps to the side and see that it’s Ryan, aka Dr. Love from KKRL. He does not work on this floor. KKRL is on the fifth floor. Is he actually sneaking onto our floor to see what kind of food we have? And I thought I was sick of the vending machines downstairs. Ballsy.

I watch him cut a tiny sliver off someone’s cheesecake and take a bite. Then I clear my throat to get his attention. He turns around, caught red-handed.

“Are you eating my cake?” I ask.

At first he doesn’t speak. I raise my eyebrows at him to say, “Well?”

“What cake?” he says, with a mouthful of food, accidentally spitting some out.

“At least chew and swallow it before you go on with this ruse.”