Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (17 page)

y trip to the Stop- In Go-Go slowed to a trudge shortly after I turned onto Springfield Avenue, which was doing its best impersonation of a mall parking lot at Christmastime. I remained calm at first, using the time to call Tina. She didn’t pick up her phone—which was perfect—so I left a message telling her that although my cell phone had been turned off, I had not been.

Once I hung up, I reminded myself I shouldn’t let something as trifling and pedestrian as a traffic jam bother me. I’d just had a near-death experience. My thoughts should be more transcendental. I should be glad for
the gift
that was sitting in traffic.

Instead, all I could think was, why, in the name of all that is most holy, was any road gridlocked at ten-thirty in the morning? It’s a lot harder to be grateful for one’s continued existence when those precious extra moments are being spent stuck behind a Nissan Pulsar with a noisy muffler and an
I STOP FOR SALSA
bumper sticker.

I finally just parked and hoofed it, and thirteen blocks later figured out the problem: the Stop- In Go-Go had become the command center for the entire metropolitan New York mass media market.

Now it was clear why such scant attention had been paid to the other two catastrophes. Everyone who was anyone in the local infotainment world had set up shop outside the charred remains of this dubiously venerable Irvington institution. The TV trucks outnumbered the fire trucks, 10 to 2, which was troubling: just think of the flammable potential of all the petroleum-based cosmetics concentrated in such a small area. I could only hope there weren’t any burning embers still floating on the breeze.

As I drew closer, I noticed none of the cameras were pointed at the building. Every last one of them had focused on the five women holding an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk outside—five exotic dancers in varying states of dress and undress.

Channels 6 and 12 were tag-teaming the husky, fake- blond Russian I recognized from my earlier visit to the Stop- In Go-Go. She was dressed in a leopard-print unitard that was being pushed to the theoretical limits of spandex’s tensile strength. Her interview seemed to have ended, but her attempts to spell her name—Svetlana Kachintsova—for the two Hairspray Heads in front of her was something straight out of an English as a Second Language class. And it wasn’t the Russian who was struggling.

Channel 7 was interviewing a woman who had saved not only herself from the fire, but also managed to wrest from the peril her knee-high spike-heeled boots. She would have been five eleven barefooted, but the boots boosted her to six three. She was being interviewed by a Smurf-sized guy who was struggling to maintain eye contact, what with his face being at the same level as her massive, silicone- aided bosom.

Channels 11 and 32, the Spanish-speaking station, were sharing two apparently close friends who had escaped the conflagration in matching kimonos. They insisted on doing their interviews with their arms wrapped around each other—as if  the male viewers needed their imaginations prodded any further—and you got the sense they were waiting for
Girls Gone Wild
to show up so they could start chewing on each other’s tongues.

But the biggest star was Tynesha, who was captivating Channels 2, 4, 9, 22, and 47 with her rendition of the morning’s harrowing events. Wearing her amber contact lenses, furry slippers, and a brief robe, she was telling her story in animated fashion, waving her arms about in a manner the robe wasn’t built to contain. She kept tugging it closed, but every once in a while, when she got too excited, it resulted in a shot that would not have been appreciated by the FCC.

In short, everyone was making great hay out of the scene at the Stop-In Go-Go, which combined the necessary local-TV elements of human tragedy, an easy-to- tell story, and great visuals—with the added bonus of involving strippers.

From a brief bit of eavesdropping on the interviews, I was amused to find the dancers’ stories contradicted each other in nearly every detail—who first became aware of the fire, who had alerted whom to the danger, who had been the most selfless heroine putting herself in harm’s way to save others, and so on.

But they seemed to agree on one basic fact: that sometime after eight that morning, when the five inhabitants of the upstairs apartments were still snoozing in their beds and dreaming of aging sugar daddies, all hell broke loose.

I sidestepped the cameras and looked for someone who resembled a spokesman for the Irvington Fire Department to get the official word, but the only firemen remaining were just as mesmerized by the dancers as everyone else.

With their attention thus occupied, I was able to slink close to the seared building and examine the damage for myself, letting my nostrils tell me the story of what happened Gasoline. It wasn’t as fresh as if someone had just soaked the rags. It was more like a little-used Exxon station, with the faint remains of an eighty-seven-octane fill-up still lingering in the air.

Or maybe ninety-three. Whatever it was, it had done the job. The tar-paper roof was more or less gone, reduced to a few scant islands of singed material remaining atop the blackened joists. The yellow aluminum siding had gone brown in spots, warped and buckled from the heat. The signature Stop- In Go-Go sign, with its curvaceously outlined dancer, was hanging askew, half melted so the dancer appeared to be some freakish doppelgänger of her former lovely self.

It was sad. That sign, that bar, had been a fixture for at least half a century in Irvington. It had seen the city through every economic and social shift, offered dancers good money and patrons a chance to blow off steam (and perhaps a little more) in a relatively safe, structured environment. I suppose you could say it had been a place of comfort for working men and a place of work for comfort women.

And now it was no more. I doubted it would be rebuilt. The own er, who had probably been looking for a way out, would take the insurance money and run, selling the land to someone who would open an auto parts franchise or a chain drugstore.

I know it’s a little strange to get sentimental about go-go bars. I certainly wouldn’t recommend running for city council on a progo-go platform.

But to me, go-go bars get a bad rap from outsiders who don’t understand the culture, people who want to see them as dens of vice and smut and nothing else. They
are
dens of vice and smut, but they’re also communities of people who, in their own bizarre way, really care about each other. They’re wholesome places, albeit in an unwholesome way, and each time one of them gets bumped out for an auto parts store, some important bit of a town’s character is lost.

My house had been blown up at the same time Miss B’s place had been doused and lit ablaze. That seemed to be the first wave of attack, and it hit around seven-thirty. The second wave, which came during the eight o’clock hour, was the go-go bar being torched and Booker T detonating.

So, obviously, my two pyromaniacs preferred different methodologies: one knew what to do with a stick of dynamite; the other was a gas man—slosh it around, throw the match, run like hell. Each had effectively destroyed whatever evidence might have been left in their respective locations. I thought about distance between the sites and the time it might take to make the necessary arrangements. The timing fit nicely.

I had just worked it out when I heard the scuffling of Tynesha’s furry slippers behind me.
“You!” she thundered. “This is all your fault!”
Her voice had been loud enough to attract the attention of all ten cameras—not to mention the firemen, the sidewalk loiterers, and the traffic stopped on Springfield Avenue—and I suddenly found all those eyes and lenses focused on me.
“That’s right,” she hollered, even louder. “Put his picture on TV. It’s all his fault. Put his picture on TV under a thingie that says ‘bastard.’ ”
Tynesha was staring at me with her arms crossed. The cameramen quickly arranged themselves to form a wall on one side of her, standing at enough distance to be able to catch a wide- angle shot of the dancer and the recipient of her ire. They clearly didn’t have a clue what Tynesha was talking about, but they recognized potentially great footage when they saw it.
“Uh-huh!” she kept railing, her head bobbing from side to side as she spoke. “
Bastard
. Oh, he act like he’s a nice white boy who takes a girl to the Outback Steakhouse and plays all friendly. And then the next thing you know you wake up and all your stuff’s on fire.”
Tynesha glared some more, challenging me to answer. But I wasn’t saying a word, not with all those cameras rolling. I know how that stuff gets cut. If I said, “It’s not like I’m guilty as sin,” what would go on TV is me saying, “I’m guilty as sin.” Plus, making the six o’clock news for arguing with an exotic dancer in front of a go-go bar was not a career-enhancing move.
The Smurf from Channel 7, undaunted by his ignorance, pointed his microphone at me.
“This woman seems to be saying you set this fire,” he said. “Do you have a response?”
I sighed and shook my head but kept my lips clamped.
“Aw, hell, he might as well have set it,” Tynesha proclaimed, walking over to the Smurf and snatching his microphone, then using it like it was hooked up to a loudspeaker system. She wanted to be heard. All the cameras instantly readjusted so their shot wasn’t screwed up.
“He didn’t strike the match but he put it in the hands of the guy who did,” Tynesha declared, emphasizing every couple of words like a Sunday-morning preacher who has gotten on a roll.
The Smurf just stood there. His journalistic wits were apparently at their end—plus, he was impotent without his microphone—but the guy from Channel 12, the one who couldn’t spell, was determined to apply his hard-nosed-reporter’s instincts to get to the bottom of this important story.
“Are you an accomplice?” he asked me, with all due drama. “Are you a coconspirator in some way?”
I slapped my hand to my forehead and finally just couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “No,” I said. “No, no, no—”
“That’s right!” Tynesha crowed. “That’s exactly what he is. He’s a Coke conspiritor and a Pepsi conspiritor and everything else!”
The hairdos stayed straight-faced, but I could see the cameramen smirking. Nothing like a little malapropism to make everyone’s day.
“Look, guys, I’m a reporter for the
Eagle-Examiner,
” I said. “I didn’t set any fires. I wrote a story, that’s all I did. You can turn your cameras off. There’s no news here.”
I thought it sounded like a reasonable request but, of course, I wasn’t thinking like a TV person. Of course there wasn’t any news. But there
was
controversy—which is far better than actual news.
“You keep those cameras rolling!” Tynesha commanded, still gripping the Smurf’s microphone. “He put my friend Wanda’s business out there. And now all my stuff’s burnt.”
“Tynesha, can we please have this conversation somewhere else?” I asked.
“No way. We’re having it right here. All my stuff’s burnt and you don’t want to talk about it with all the cameras? Why, because it don’t make you look good?”
“It has nothing to do with looking good,” I countered. “There are some things I need to tell you. In private.”
The hairdos had not yet put A (that Tynesha was talking about the story I had written in that day’s
Eagle-Examiner
) together with B (that the places I had written about were under attack), so I could only assume they thought they were watching some kind of bizarre lover’s quarrel. The cameras had started swiveling back and forth between me and Tynesha, as if they were covering a tennis match.
“No, I’m through with your crap,” Tynesha bellowed. “Why didn’t y’all just put a map in the damn newspaper, maybe some directions, too. I’m going to get me a lawyer and sue the damn hell out of you and your newspaper.”
I finally lost my patience.
“Tynesha, look, I’ve lost everything, too, okay?” I said. “Whoever did this threw a bundle of dynamite through my living room window this morning. He blew up my house. He blew up everything I own. He even blew up my cat.”
I hated to play the cat card, but I needed to invoke a little bit of sympathy—if not for me then at least for Deadline.
It didn’t work.
“Serves you right!” she snapped. “You just wait until I tell Miss B what happened. She ain’t gonna give you no pie. She ain’t gonna talk to you no more. She ain’t going to answer the door when you knock.”
“Tynesha,” I said as quietly as I could, turning my back to the cameras in the hopes they couldn’t hear me. “Miss B’s place got burned, too. She’s not . . . she’s not looking too good.”
Tynesha came at me with fresh rage, fists flying.
“You bastard!” she screamed, veins bulging. “You bastard! You killed her, you killed her!”
She was flailing at me more than she was punching me. I was able to hold her off easily enough—long arms are nice sometimes—though midway through the attack, the belt on her robe slipped loose. With her breasts flopping everywhere, I had to be a little more delicate about the manner in which I restrained her.
Tynesha either didn’t know or didn’t care that her goods were being aired for public consumption—perhaps mass public consumption. She just kept screaming obscenities at me until the big blond Rus sian grabbed her. Eventually, Tynesha allowed herself to be corralled away. She had been choking back sobs so she would still have breath to berate me, but she couldn’t hold them forever.
“You bastard!” she shrieked one more time, then collapsed into the Russian, who offered her a protective, motherly embrace and shot me a Siberia-cold glower.
The cameras had, naturally, caught the whole ugly thing and they stayed trained on Tynesha and her grief. That left me alone with my thoughts. If I had felt like rationalizing, I could have told myself I was only doing my job, that I hadn’t set anything on fire or blown anything up, that I was just as much of a victim as anyone else.
But knowing the ruin my article was causing—even if the ruin wasn’t my fault—I couldn’t help but think Tynesha right. I 
was
a bastard.