Drive Me Crazy (2 page)

Married women. That was another lesson I’d learned.

I say that because of the scam. Well, it was more than a simple scam. Scams involved confidence men who convinced you to give them their money. It took days, maybe even weeks before you realized you’d been had. And it was all done with a handshake and a smile.

What we planned was a bona fide crime.

Whether for selfish or personal reasons, we needed money, the root of all evil. I lived in Los Angeles County. The median cost of a single-family home was damn near four hundred thousand. Car registration had tripled. Gas prices were out of control. My one-bedroom apartment was in Inglewood, a city that had no rent control, and rent had shot up thirty percent, and now my rent was a little over twelve hundred a month. No matter how much I hustled, no matter how much money I made, it wasn’t enough. Maybe I just wanted to make some spending money to make it through another lean year in the Bush-whacked new millennium. I could say that with Schwarzenegger as the new “governator” after California’s total recall, I wanted to save up for the unknown. I could say a lot of shit. But I knew it wasn’t about the state budget or an energy crisis or an economy struggling to recover.

I just wanted to impress
her.

There was always a “her” involved.

I’m going too fast.

Let me backtrack.

I was chilling at a dilapidated pool hall in South Central, a place called Back Biters and Syndicators, named after a John Lee Hooker song. The regulars just called the joint Back Biters, an old slang term for somebody who couldn’t be trusted, and it didn’t matter if the hand was black or white. It was a hangout with unfinished walls, decent pool tables, and hard liquor. No snooker or baccarat, no high-end shit like that. A joint where candidates for three strikes made or lost their rent gambling on eight or nine ball, maybe shooting craps in the back.

That evening I was sitting at the bar sipping a beer with my boss, Jason Wolf, Jr. We called him by his last name, Wolf. Six-footer with a Nordic blond mane. Two years younger than me. Hair was thinning up top. Kept what was left pulled back into a smooth ponytail. Wolf was a gray-eyed silver-spoon baby who had dropped out of NYU almost as soon as he walked into the institution of higher learning. Said NYU bored him. He used to drive back in New York, but after his dad died and left him a nice piece of change, he relocated West about ten years ago and started his own thing with his windfall.

He was the only man to give me a chance on this side of The Wall.

We’d shot some eight ball, then called it quits and posted up at the small bar, beers on the counter, chilling the night away. I was reading parts of the
L.A. Times,
looking for new words to add to my vocabulary. I loved learning ten-dollar words like
abstemious
and
solipsism,
then throwing them in a conversation and watching the stupid light come on in somebody’s eyes.

Wolf was stroking his goatee with two fingers while he struggled with the crossword puzzle. Both of us had on dark suits. Mine was Italian. Wolf’s was more conservative, along the Brooks Brothers style. The poor always tried to look rich and the rich tried to look normal.

“Eighty-one across ... five letters.” Wolf grunted. He sounded like an old man who’d smoked since he was evicted from his momma’s womb. “Driver, what the hell is baklava glue?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“C‘mon man. Help a brother out.”

Pedro was passing by, heard Wolf call himself a brother and laughed. Pedro was the bartender, a short, clean-cut, thick Hispanic man. Looked like Enrique Iglesias with bad metabolism and a smooth salt-and-pepper goatee. Second generation in this country. He was in his forties and had married his high school sweetheart the day he got out of the army.

I said, “You hear that, Pedro?”

Pedro shrugged. “Marrying a black woman has made him black by osmosis.”

We all laughed at that.

Pedro was a former aerospace worker who got downsized from his cozy sixty-thousand-dollar-a-year gig as a project engineer at Northrop almost ten years ago. He spent two years looking for a job and trying to feed his family off his 401(k) and unemployment. He retrained, then finally got on at Boeing at a serious pay cut. He was about to get downsized at Boeing, a nasty little déjà vu, but got fired before they could kick him out. Something went down. He went postal and beat the shit out of his manager and tried to choke him into an early grave. Down here, people admired Pedro for what he did. A lot of disgruntled motherfuckers wanted to do the same to both the man and the system. That was four years back, with eight months of that spent on lockdown, twice as long in anger management.

Wolf ranked on Pedro. “You’re as Mexican as Taco Bell and you’re breaking my balls?”

Pedro shook his head. “Here we go again. Dean Martin walks in with Sammy Davis, Jr., and the corny jokes come out.”

I told Wolf, “I think he just called you Sammy Davis, Jr.”

More laughter while blues man Robert B. Jones sang about a kindhearted woman.

“Driver, what’s up with your people?” Wolf turned to me. “Mexi cans have all the jobs that the black people used to have.”

Pedro retorted, “Don’t hate.”

Wolf went on, “Walk on a construction site, into the kitchen at a soul food restaurant, or check out the hotel workers, hardly a black person in sight.”

I shot Wolf the middle finger of love.

Pedro retorted, “It’s our damn country, asshole. And for your information the original name of this land given by the original people was
El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles
but we had to shorten it because the gringos came over on the short yellow bus.”

“Are you insulting me, Pedro? Is that a racial slur I hear?”

“Damn right. Your Brad Pitt-looking ass don’t like it, hop in your Ferrari and go back to whatever part of Europe your pagan people migrated from.”

“I’m Catholic. And I drive a Lamborghini.”

Pedro huffed. “The cheap one.”

“Cheap? You drive a Hyundai.”

“The expensive one.”

Outrageous laughter came from all three of us.

I said, “The original residents called this part of the country
Wenot,
Pedro. Downtown was
Yang-ya.
Next time you put a motherfucker in his place, have your facts straight.”

Pedro said, “You’re an asshole, Driver.”

Wolf added, “A damn Encyclopedia Brown.”

“You know? Walking around with his head filled with useless information.”

I flipped both of them off.

We all laughed, and that felt better than chicken soup. I’d had a rough day. I’d driven a rapper to do an interview at a hip-hop radio station on Wilshire, not far from the La Brea Tar Pits. A gangsta rapper who ain’t never been in a gang. He was buffed and hardcore, but rumors had been circulating about his sexual preferences. The DJ straight out asked him if he was gay. That was during morning drive time, so millions of people were listening. The rapper went off and tore up the studio. Microphones were broken, there was a big fight. Station management tried to play it down. So after a day like that, I needed some spirits and laughter.

I had to drink, had to laugh, had to get this tension off my back. A big debt hanging over my head, my own cloud and angst that let me know the devil would come to get his due.

Pedro asked Wolf, “How is the wife?”

“New one or old one?”

“New one.”

“Did I tell you she flew up to Vegas with me, wanted to go to a trade show, Taser International booth. Bought a stun gun. Fifty thousand volts. Those suckers have been big since Nine-Eleven. And she got in line, let them zap her. Fifty thousand volts. She took it like she was a damn android. Got up and spent four hundred on a stun gun. Would you believe she did that?”

I shifted, hid my discomfort, and nodded. “I believe it.”

“Said she wanted it for protection. She has guns all over the house. You don’t buy a stun gun like that for protection. You buy that for torture.”

Silence covered us all.

Wolf asked our friend, “How’s the family, Pedro?”

“Just hope the grocery stores end this strike. My wife has been picketing for three months already. My daughter is in college. We have two car notes. It’s killing us right now.”

Pedro licked his lips, swallowed his frustration, then moved on to another customer.

Wolf asked me about baklava glue again. He was getting frustrated, I could tell. Underneath that cool demeanor he had some temper, some aggravation. The kind that trying to please the wrong woman gave a man. He had no idea who his wife really was.

I patted Wolf’s shoulder, told him, “Five letters. Try h-o-n-e-y.”

He thanked me.

It seemed like yesterday, but almost six months had passed since I had crept into his office, dressed in a black Italian suit, murder and another man’s fortune on my mind. Almost six months to the day. I know because my mother had died late that same evening. Got the message from my brother when I was on the way to kill Wolf.

I didn’t kill Wolf. Didn’t have to. Wolf was already gone.

The way he spoke, I could see Wolf was the living dead. The alcohol on his breath and the dullness in his eyes told me that somebody had killed him from the inside out, had left him living in a prison of his own. One that nobody could see but him.

Women had the power to do that.

His wife, Lisa, had been a bitch in five-hundred-dollar boots. She was his second wife, both African-American. Both beautiful as sin. But Lisa. Her image lived with me. Caramel skin. Bambi-like eyes. Shoulder-length auburn hair. Happy-go-lucky smile. She had upgraded her boobs from A to C, all paid for by Wolf. Her teeth had been veneered. She had a perfect smile. A simple glance at Lisa felt like a transgression, so I didn’t stare at her anymore. Even the scent of her perfume reminded me of when I was fucking her inside his home.

Wasn’t for Wolf I’d either be a poster child for recidivism—back in the joint getting three hots and a cot—or sleeping on a cardboard box with America’s discarded vets.

Didn’t want to think about that shit right now.

He gave me a job. That was all I really wanted. Just needed to get back on my feet.

 

Pedro whistled, then said, “Look at that dime walking in.”

My attention followed his eyes to the front door. So did Wolf’s.

This dime piece was standing underneath a giant Stroh’s beer sign that was hanging in the doorway. The room was dimly lit, but there was enough light to see what she had to offer. Light brown skin. Long straight hair. Nice curves. Modest frame. She moved like she had an edge about her, like she was looking for trouble. Everybody noticed her. She had more style than the secondhand-suit and FUBU crowd that populated the bar.

I asked Wolf, “Who she?”

Pedro answered, “She breezed through here a couple days ago.”

Wolf went back to his crossword puzzle, more interested in his own personal mystery.

I said, “She’s ripe.”

Pedro nodded. “Put her hair in two ponytails and R. Kelly will be all over her.”

Pedro moved on, went to sell spirits and salvation to the masses by the glass.

She moved in our direction. Some women got closer and dropped from dimes to nines to eights, kept falling like the stock market. She never lost a point. She had on a long, black leather skirt, the kind that had a split and showed off her legs. Her heels were the kind that made her legs look good and her feet feel bad. Her straight hair had deep brown highlights.

Wolf grunted. “Driver, rat’s last meal. Starts with A ... ends in NIC ... seven letters.”

My eyes were anchored to the new girl, watching her move her baklava glue around the room. She saw me admiring her. I nodded. She held onto her business face, made a motion that asked me if I wanted to challenge her on the table. I shook my head, motioned at an empty seat next to me. She shook her head, moved on, found a sister who had money to burn.

“Rat’s last meal ... starts with A ... ends with NIC,” I mumbled. “Arsenic.”

Wolf scribbled in the answer, smiled like a kid who was done with his homework, and checked his watch. “I smell like two beers and fried fish from Geraldine’s. Lisa’s gonna pitch a bitch. Talk to you tomorrow, Driver.”

“No you won’t. I’m off tomorrow. Don’t even think about ringing my phone.”

“You ungrateful fuck. What you got planned?”

I told him that TNT was running a lot of movies I liked tomorrow, old noir movies like
Act of Violence. Last Train from Gun Hill. The Set-Up. The Big Heat. The Killers.

Wolf said,
“The Killers.
I liked the first one with Ava Gardner. It was cold-blooded how those men marched up those stairs and killed that man without a thought.”

“Yeah, they did. Without a thought. They sure did.” I cleared both my mind and my throat, mumbled out my thoughts. “Lancaster and Gardner.”