A Permanent Member of the Family (16 page)

By now the six-to-closing shift has hit the floor, Tiffany and Alicia, the Mutt and Jeff of waitresses, the long and the short of it. Which is a good thing because, in addition to the Daytona State coaching staff, eight or ten slim young dudes have just sailed in. They want champagne. They want to hang out with the piano at the Piano. It's their fourth night here at the hotel and their first night off from performing at the Hard Rock with Cher, who is rumored to have taken the entire top floor of the hotel for herself and is having everything sent up. No one on the staff in any of the casino bars and restaurants can claim to have seen her in person up close except for a few waitresses and some stagehands who glimpsed her when she was being helped on- or offstage by one of her many assistants.

These guys tonight are Cher's backup singers and dancers, and they're lookers, naturally. They're sharp L.A. dressers with perfect rotisserie tans and matching razor-cut haircuts and bodies that won't quit. They're all wearing tight black trousers like toreadors and puffy-sleeved shirts in various pastel colors that should be called blouses, not shirts, and they don't stand around and drink and brag to each other or hit on strangers like most male customers. Instead they wave their hands in the air and talk in staged voices like they're about to break into a Liza Minnelli song. They flounce and bounce like the tiled floor is a trampoline. They're performers and can't stop.

I enjoy listening to them and watching them move. They make me want to sing and dance myself, even if I can't carry a tune and am heavy-footed and have a lousy sense of rhythm. I'm sixty-four and though in my youth had the requisite looks, I never acted the way they do, and now I sometimes wish I had. Not necessarily the gay part, but the loud, dancing, showing-off part. The flash and flamboyance. It looks like fun.

Too late now, though. The flashiest thing I ever did in my youth was audition for a porn movie production company in South Beach when I was thirty-five, divorced and broke. I have a seven-inch dick, but they said it had to be seven and a half, so I took a forty-hour mixology course at the New York Bartending School of South Florida instead. The rest is history. I'm still divorced, but no longer broke. I still have a seven-inch dick, but I'm not thirty-five anymore.

 

A
ROUND SEVEN,
Allyn seems
to break the mirror's hold on his attention. He shakes his head and blubbers his lips like he's waking from a nap and asks for driving directions to the Green Door. I make him wait while I finish topping off seven flutes of Moët & Chandon for Cher's chorus line. Mutt and Jeff tray the flutes and haul ass. When I give Allyn the directions I say he should be careful driving. After four Long Island iced teas, if the cops stop him no way he'll pass a Breathalyzer.

He sticks out his chest and says, “Are you intimating I'm drunk?”

Enrique folds his paper and says, “Back the fuck off, white bread, or I'll cut your fucking nuts off.”

Both Allyn and I say, “Huh?”

It's not clear whose nuts he's threatening to cut off or why. I assume they're Allyn's, but Allyn's giving me a concerned look like he thinks they're mine.

Enrique furrows his brow like he's going to cry. He looks first at me, then at Allyn, and says, “Jesus Christ, I don't know what made me say that. I'm really, really sorry, man. I got this disease, it's like a kind of autism and makes me say shit I don't want to say. I apologize, man.”

I tell him no problem, and Allyn says the same, and then, as if to reassure him, Allyn invites Enrique to come along with him to the Green Door.

Enrique politely declines.

Allyn turns to me and says, “How about you, bartender? Care to join me at the Green Door and get sweaty wet with whatever or whomever you fancy?”

It strikes me that Allyn's the one with the disease that makes people say weird shit they don't mean, except that he means it. “No, thanks, man. I got too much to do here tonight.”

Enrique says, “Yeah? What're you doing, killing people?”

“Naw, not tonight,” I say. “Actually, my replacement called in sick, so I'm stuck here till closing. Otherwise, yeah, I'd be out killing people.” Two can play at this game.

Allyn says, “Or hanging with me at the Green Door!” He lays a hundred on the bar and says keep the change and wobbles from the bar. I deduct sixty for the register and pocket the rest.

Enrique says, “No fucking way that dude's going to end up at the Green Door.”

I ask him about this disease he's got, if it comes and goes, or does he have to fight it all the time in order not to say shit he doesn't mean.

“Only time I can forget it is when I'm sleeping. Sometimes I get tired of fighting it, like tonight, and just say fuck it, you know?”

I say I know. But what I really want to know, and don't ask, is how it feels to suddenly blurt out whatever pops into your head. It must be like going behind the green door. It must feel really good to let yourself do that. It must in a way be fun, like being a glittery member of Cher's chorus line swirling across the stage singing “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” which is what they're singing now at the far end of the bar, one of them on the piano, the six others, arms over shoulders, in an actual chorus line, kicking left, kicking right, having a wonderful time performing that goofball of a song for each other and for anyone else in the bar who cares to watch and listen. The coaches all dig it, and Mutt and Jeff grin and watch, and even Enrique seems to like it. And me—maybe especially me, I like it.

 

I
T'S TWO IN THE MORNING
before I finally clear everybody out and get the bar washed and locked down and head for the employees' parking lot on the other side of Seminole Way. I'm dragging my bony ass, but if I worked for one of the casino bars instead of the Piano I'd be serving drunks till dawn, so I'm not complaining, just saying.

As I cross the lot toward my Corolla, motion detectors automatically turn on the new ecologically correct LED streetlights, and after I've passed beneath they switch off behind me, one bright light handing me on to the next and then blinking out, all the way across the enormous, nearly empty lot. Palm trees along the sidewalk click and snap in the breeze. A quickie rain shower has cooled the air and clouds of steam rise from the lot as if the pavement is heated from below by fires in the devil's workshop. I've crossed this lot thousands of times and never given it a nod, but tonight for some reason it's spooky. Makes me edgy.

In my head I'm listening to Enrique and Allyn, especially Allyn, when I arrive at my car and get in. Over the course of the night I had maybe a dozen conversations with customers, some of them interesting, even a couple of them useful. Despite that, I can't remember a one of them, except for my exchange with Enrique and Allyn at the start of the evening, which has stayed with me in a slightly irritating way, like a day-old bee sting.

I'm driving across the lot in the direction of the exit at Lucky Street, still running those guys' words past my inner ears, when my headlights catch three men and a solitary Ford Fusion sedan with its front doors wide open parked at an angle across two adjacent spaces. Caught in the cone of my headlights the three figures are otherwise surrounded by darkness. They act like I'm not there or they don't give a shit that I am. One of the three is jumping around and making big purposeful punching gestures like he's reenacting a WWE wrestling match. He appears to be shouting at the other two, who stand off a few feet and watch him warily as if they're not sure why he's performing for them. They're younger and smaller than he is—red-faced, unshaven Raggedy Andys, a fat one with a long braid who looks like a Seminole and a scrawny one who looks Hispanic. Homeless sunburnt junkies or rosy-faced drunks, I figure. South Florida's largest minority. Next to the sedan they've parked a matching pair of grocery carts stacked with garbage bags filled with all their worldly goods.

The one making the wild gestures I suddenly realize is Allyn, my Long Island iced tea guy, who looks like he's been mugged—bow tie undone, shirt unbuttoned to below his navel, the right sleeve of his jacket half torn off, the suit itself spattered with mud and what looks like spilled red wine or possibly blood, hard to tell in the glare of my headlights. His comb-over is fluffed up like he put his finger in a light socket. He's got a couple of ugly blue bruises on his forehead and a purplish egg swelling below his left eye.

I've stopped my car maybe twenty feet away from him, still inside the parking lot with a high-curbed concrete island between my car and his rental. I reach over to lower the passenger's-side window so I can talk to Allyn. He doesn't look quite sane. But not exactly insane, either.

I get the window all the way down and holler, “Hey, man, you okay? You need help?”

He glances in my direction but doesn't seem to recognize me. “I've had enough help for one night, thank you very much! Unless you're the police and can arrest these two!”

“Allyn, it's me, the guy who sent you to the Green Door, remember?”

The Indian and the Spanish guy edge slowly toward their carts, still keeping a wary eye on Allyn. He looks like he recognizes me now and takes a step in my direction, then sees the two homeless guys about to escape. “Not so fast!” he shouts at them. “We have some unfinished business to settle!”

The two freeze and switch their gaze from him to me and back again. Up to now they've probably been goofing on Allyn, the only guy around who seems crazier than they are. They're thinking they can handle Allyn—they obviously already have—but not the two of us. And maybe I'm carrying a weapon. This is South Florida, after all, and anybody out this late is likely to be armed and could legally shoot them both and say he felt threatened by them. In fact, I have a loaded Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .38 in the glove compartment and could easily take control of this situation if I wanted to. But I don't want to. And I don't feel threatened.

“What's happening here, Allyn?”

“They put something in my drink.”

“Who?”

“I don't know. At the Green Door! I woke up in my car, and these two were going through my pockets and taking off my watch.”

“What happened at the Green Door?”

“I said, they put something in my drink! Slipped me a mickey! Knockout drops or something!”

“So did you get what you wanted there?”

“I don't remember anything! All I remember is going through the green door. Then suddenly I'm back here in my car and these two are taking my wallet and my Movado. And now I'm going to beat the shit out of them and take my fucking wallet and watch back!”

The Indian and the Spanish guy look mildly pissed is all, like this crazy dude interrupted a friendly parking lot Thunderbird nightcap. I say, “You guys take his wallet and his watch?”

They shake their heads no. Their eyes are half closed.

I say to Allyn, “Knockout drops? Slipped you a mickey? Give me a break, man. What kinda movies you been watching? You were shitfaced when you left the Piano. You probably never even got out of the parking lot. It's called a blackout, asshole.”

I turn to the homeless guys, “Fuck him. He's all yours.”

Then, for reasons I can't know or name, I back my car off a short ways. I close the window, and everything comes to a halt, like I'm suddenly unplugged. No power. I just sit there behind the wheel and watch everything unfold like it's happening in high def on a flat-screen with the sound off.

I can't hear him, but I know from Allyn's face and his bulging eyes that he's gone back to yelling at the two homeless guys, and while he yells he dances a weird kind of jig, hopping from one foot to the other with his knees slightly bent. He's flailing his arms and bobbing his head, almost like he's having an epileptic seizure, except his movements are more or less coordinated and intentional. He's gesturing with his hands for them to bring it on, c'mon, man, bring it on!

The Hispanic guy reaches into his front pocket and pulls out a small jackknife and opens the blade.

The Indian guy touches his friend on the arm and says something to him.

As if he hasn't seen the Hispanic guy's jackknife and doesn't see the more serious hunting knife that the Indian has removed from a leather case strapped to his lower leg, Allyn keeps yelling and dancing a fat guy's version of the Ali Shuffle.

The Hispanic guy reaches out with his pocketknife and slashes Allyn's neck from below his right ear to his collarbone, and blood spurts from an artery. Allyn stumbles in his dance and takes one more hop, when the Indian punches his blade into Allyn's belly and jerks it back. With his free hand the Indian pushes Allyn backward two steps. He falls onto the pavement. Blood pours from his mouth. He gurgles, goes silent, kicks both feet once and is still.

The two men wipe their blades on Allyn's pant leg and put their knives away. Not once do they look my way. It's like I'm not there, and in a way I'm not. They grab their grocery carts and disappear into the darkness. I drop my Corolla into gear and cross the parking lot to the exit, turn left onto Lucky Street and drive home.

I go to bed. I fall asleep quickly and sleep without dreams until nearly noon the next day.

 

A
WEEK,
maybe ten
days later, I'm setting up the bar for the night, shining glasses with a towel, and Enrique strolls in and perches on his usual stool at the bar. Though he's never done anything to make me personally dislike him, I can't say I'm real happy to see him. He reminds me of shit I'd rather not think about.

I nod hello, and he says, “Vodka martini. Straight up. Ketel One. Extra dry. Three olives.” While I make his drink he eyes me, like he's auditioning me for a job at a private club, and when I set it in front of him he says, “I appreciate how you make a martini, man.”