Hard Case Crime: Fake I.D. (6 page)

“I guess I must’ve put on the dog-biscuit cologne this morning,” I said. Nobody laughed.

“I’m very sorry about this,” the director said.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I mean blame the dog, right?”

“We’ll contact your manager or agent if any other roles come along.”

I stood there for a couple of seconds before it set in, but then I still couldn’t believe it.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Don’t you want to hear me read the line?”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” the director said.

Again I stared at him, then I said, “Why not?”

“Because you’re not getting along with Molly.”

“Who’s Molly?”

“Molly is the dog.”

“So bring Molly back in here. Maybe she’ll calm down.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Russo, but we have to see the next actor now.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said, “because I don’t think this is fair. I came all the way down here, I practiced for this part. The least you could let me do—”

“Please leave, Mr. Russo.”

“I just want to read my line,” I said. “If you’d just sit back for a second you’d see—”

“I asked you nicely to leave, Mr. Russo. We’re not hiring you for this role so you’re just wasting all of our time by being here. So I’ll ask you nicely one last time—please leave.”

I knew the smart thing to do was to walk out of there, keep my mouth shut.

“Why do you think you can talk to people this way?” I said. “Just because you’re a big shot, sitting over there behind your desk?”

The director whispered something to the guy next to him and the guy took out a cell phone and started making a call.

“If you want to avoid a very bad scene,” the director said, “you’ll turn around and leave right now.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

The director and the other guys were standing up now, talking to each other. I heard the director call me an “asshole” and something in me snapped. I went after him, climbing over the desk. He backed away and the other guys tried to hold me back. I broke free, then two security guards came up behind me and pulled me out of the room. They escorted me out of the building and said if I ever showed up there again I’d be arrested.

Walking along Fifty-seventh Street, I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I knew if I thought about it anymore I’d really start getting down on myself, so I did what I always did when I wanted to take my mind off my problems—I stopped at a newsstand and bought the
Racing Form
, then I headed crosstown toward the OTB Inside Track on Second Avenue.

I hung out upstairs, at a table in the back under the sun roof. The usual degenerates were there—guys I saw all the time, but I didn’t know any of their last names. A couple of people were my age, but almost everybody else was over sixty. Sometimes I got depressed, thinking about these guys who’d retired to spend more time with their wives and their kids, but they wound up spending all their time betting. I knew I wasn’t as bad as they were, but I also knew I could wind up like them if I didn’t watch out.

The third race was going off. I played the one and the horse jogged—suddenly, I was up over three hundred bucks. When I was collecting, I gave Lucy, the teller, a five-dollar tip. I didn’t like anything in the fourth so I sat it out. But in the fifth I loved a horse. I was going to bet a hundred bucks, then I decided, what the hell, and I let the three hundred ride. The horse got caught in a speed duel and faded to last. By two o’clock, I was back home, broke again, watching TV.

Now all I could think about was the audition. Maybe if what happened today had happened a few years ago, or even a few months ago, things would’ve been different. I would’ve thanked the director for his time and walked calmly out of the building. But I guess there’s a limit to how much abuse one man can take. After over thirteen years of trying to make it as an actor and not getting anywhere, it was hard to stay calm sometimes.

I decided to get back up on my horse—stop feeling sorry for myself.

I called my manager to see if he had any more auditions for me to go on. Danielle, his secretary, told me to hold on, then she came back and said Martin was out of the office.

“But I thought you said he was
in
the office,” I said.

“I
thought
he was in the office,” Danielle said, “but he wasn’t at his desk.”

I’d known Danielle a long time and I could tell she was lying.

“I know he’s there,” I said. “Could you please just tell him to take my call? I’ll only take a minute, tops.”

“Hold on a second,” she said.

A minute or two went by, then Martin came on the line.

“So what’s the deal,” I said, “you don’t want to take my phone calls?”

“I was going to call you later today anyway,” Martin said.

“What’s going on?” I said. “You got something hot for me to go on? Because if you do I’m ready to go. I’ll even go out again today.”

“I think we should end our relationship, Tommy.”

“What?” I said, but I’d heard him loud and clear.

“I spoke with Kevin Parker and he told me what happened this afternoon at your audition.”

“Oh,
that
,” I said. “Look, I can explain—”

“I don’t need an explanation. The fact is I think both of us know this isn’t working out. We’d probably both be better off if you found somebody else to represent you.”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I just wanted to read my line and he wouldn’t let me. I know it was wrong of me to open my mouth, but I couldn’t help it. If you want me to call him up and apologize—”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Tommy. Look, I know how badly you want to make it as an actor and I’m not saying you should quit, but maybe you shouldn’t approach it as seriously as you have been. In any case, I think a new manager can only help.”

“But don’t you even want to hear my side of the story?”

“It has nothing to do with what happened today—”

“Bullshit. If that asshole Kevin Parker didn’t call you up you’d never be dumping me now.”

“I’m sorry, Tommy, I have to go—”

“Please, Martin. I didn’t mean...the guy was baiting me. He wanted me to blow up.”

“I have to go. Goodbye, Tommy.”

“Wait, don’t—”

He hung up. I slammed the phone down. I sat calmly for a few seconds, then I yanked the cord out of the wall and tossed the phone across the room. Screaming, I kicked a chair out of my way, then I tore down the poster from
Raging Bull
and ripped it to shreds. I ripped up my head shot and picked up the phone and threw it across the room again. Finally, I sat down on the couch with my head in my hands.

For a while, I was mad at Martin. The fucking guy couldn’t make it as an actor himself, so now he was taking it out on every other wannabe actor in the city. He was just like the directors and the producers—saying whatever he felt like saying because he knew he had the power to get away with it. But then, as I started to calm down, I decided it wasn’t really Martin’s fault. He’d been good to me over the years, probably sticking with me a lot longer than any other manager would have. Besides, he wasn’t the one going to those auditions, getting turned down for role after role. I had nobody to blame for that but myself.

Martin was right—it was probably time for me to stop taking acting so seriously. It had nothing to do with talent because if you put me in auditions with other actors and all things were equal I knew I’d get the roles every time. But that was just it—all things
weren’t
equal. To make it as an actor you had to be part of the clique. You had to go to one of the big-time acting schools—graduate from Yale or N.Y.U., or you had to have some famous teacher or acting coach—Meisner, Stani-fucking-slavsky. Those people were “in the business.” But if you were like me, and you didn’t have the fancy connections, you didn’t have a shot in hell of making it.

I took my wallet from my jeans’ pocket and slid out Pete Logan’s business card which had Alan Schwartz’s phone number on the back of it. I plugged the phone back into the wall—amazingly, it still worked—and dialed. On the second ring a snobby-sounding woman answered, “Alan Schwartz’s office.”

“Yeah, can I speak to Alan Schwartz?” I said.

“May I ask who’s calling please?” she said, treating me like dirt.

“Tommy Russo.”

“Is he expecting your call, Mr. Russo?”

“Yeah...I mean no...I mean kind of. Tell him Pete Logan said I should call him.”

The line was dead, like she might have hung up, then she said, “Hold please,” like it was busting her balls to transfer a call to her boss. Music came on—Stevie Wonder singing “Part-Time Lover.” Then the secretary came back on and said, “Mr. Schwartz is in a meeting now—he’ll have to call you back.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“When’s the meeting gonna be over?”

“He has meetings all afternoon. Would you like to leave a message or shall I connect you to his voice mail?”

“You think it’ll be over soon?”

I heard her take a deep breath. “I’ll connect you to his voice mail.”

Before I could say anything else, I heard a click, then Alan Schwartz’s voice came on.

This is the message I left:

“Hey, Alan, my name’s Tommy—Tommy Russo. You don’t know me, but a guy I think you know, said he was a good friend of yours, named Pete Logan, said I should throw you a call if I wanted to go in on that horse deal with you. Well, I want in, so can you give me a call when you have a chance? My home number’s 646-879-4355. All right? Thanks a lot, Mr. Schwartz, I mean Alan. Take it easy.”

As soon as I hung up I realized how stupid I was. First of all, I wasn’t going to be home tonight. What if he called me back and I missed the call? Or what if he left a message and my answering machine was on the blink?

I called Pete at the Kings Highway branch of his shoe store. I didn’t think he’d be there but I figured I could at least leave another message. A girl picked up and I asked for Pete. “Hold on,” she said, then a guy came on the line and said, “This is Pete.”

His voice didn’t sound like it did at jai-alai. On the phone, he had a heavy Brooklyn accent.

“This Pete Logan?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is Tommy Russo. You know, from jai-alai.”

He didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, then he said, “Hey, how’s it going? I didn’t think I was gonna be hearing from you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a surprise, that’s all. So what’s going on?”

“Not much,” I said. “So you still need a fifth guy for that syndicate?”

“Far as I know.”

“Then stop looking ’cause you found your man.”

“You’re kidding me?” he said. “That’s terrific. So you...the money isn’t a problem?”

“No problem at all.”

“Great. You call Alan yet?”

“That’s why I’m calling you. I left a message for him but I didn’t want him to go out and find somebody else.”

“You don’t gotta worry about that. Alan would have to approve any new guy with the rest of us, so as soon as I hear from him I’ll tell him we can stop our search. And we
can
stop it, right? I mean you’re a hundred percent about this, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean I want to meet with the other guys first and see what it’s all about. But if it all checks out...”

“I got you, I got you,” Pete said. “This is great—exactly what I was hoping for when we started this thing—to get some real racing fans involved. There’re a lot of guys who could put up the money, but what fun would that be? We want guys who love the sport, who always dreamed of owning a horse but never thought they’d be able to.”

“That’s me,” I said, wondering how the hell I was going to come up with the ten grand.

When I arrived at O’Reilley’s at five-thirty, Gil, the regular day bartender, was behind the bar, reading a paperback. I asked him if Frank was around and he shook his head.

“But he’s coming in today, right?”

“Yeah, he called before. He’ll be in soon.”

Gil went back to reading his book—
Resurrection
by Leo Tolstoy. Gil was about twenty-five and he had black curly hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses. Whenever he wasn’t serving customers, he always seemed to be reading a book or writing in a pad. He said he wrote short stories and poems, but nobody in the bar had ever read anything he wrote. I used to think that the guy was doing the right thing—working at a bar to support his dream—but now I realized what a loser he was.

At six o’clock, Gil’s shift was over and Gary wasn’t in yet so I took over at the bar. Usually, Thursdays were good nights for happy hour, but maybe the cold was keeping people away because it was seven o’clock and there were only five people in the whole place—a couple of girls at the bar drinking screwdrivers, and a few guys in suits drinking beer, standing behind the girls, trying to get up the balls to go over and talk to them.

I put a CD—“The All-Time Best Party Songs”—into the stereo, then I leaned against the bar, flipping pages of the
Daily News
as Meat Loaf sang “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.”

This was basically the way things were when Debbie O’Reilley came into the bar.

As usual, she was smashed. She could barely stand on her high heels and she had a big drunk smile. Her makeup was caked on and she was wearing long white shiny boots, a red miniskirt, and a short fur coat. Her fake D- or E-cup boobs were sticking straight out, pressing against her tight blouse. She looked like one of those cheap hookers on the West Side Highway, a hooker ten years past her prime.

I never really understood why Frank had married Debbie, but I figured it was because she was young and sexy—well, young as far as Frank was concerned—and I guess she
was
kind of sexy. She was an ex-table dancer, in one of those clubs the Mayor closed down on Seventh Avenue, and for a woman who must have been pushing fifty, she definitely had a nice shape. But a good body wasn’t a reason to marry a woman and there wasn’t much else to like about her. She was always nasty to Frank, especially when she was drunk, talking to his face about the other guys she was fucking, and Frank was rich as hell. He owned a bar and a big three-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-second Street. A lot of good-looking women would probably be clawing to meet a rich, successful guy like him, but instead he’d married a sleazy alcoholic who obviously didn’t love him and who always treated him like dirt. The only explanation I could come up with was that Frank was lonely. Frank’s first wife had died a long time ago and maybe he just wanted somebody to come home to at night. Or, maybe he just liked the excitement of having a crazy alcoholic like Debbie in his life.