Kockroach (7 page)

“Chess?”

“It’s a great game,” says Mite. “The game of kings, which is what you and me, we’re going to be. An old geezer learned me the game in Philly. It teaches you how to use your noggin.”

“Your noggin,” says Kockroach as the man in the vest takes a towel and starts wiping what’s left of the white goop off his face.

“That’s it, baby. That’s how to get ahead in this world. When this is all over, I’m going to teach you how to play. We’ll have usselves a game, you and me.”

“You and me.”

“What do you think here, Mite?” says the man in the vest when all the goop is wiped off Kockroach’s face.

“Nice, Charlie,” says Mite. “Very nice. He cleans up good, don’t he?”

“Yes he does.”

“It’s like looking at someone new without the beard. You want a look there, palsy?” says Mite. “Spin him around, Charlie.”

The man with the vest dusts Kockroach with a sharp white powder, brushes the back of his neck, pulls away the towel, spins around the chair until Kockroach is staring at a man in a chair staring back at him. He moves his shoulders and so
does the other man in the chair. It is the thing he saw before, in the small white room, the thing that shows him himself. He hasn’t seen his face since the early days of his strange new molt, and never before without the little hairs on his cheek. He examines himself carefully. He reaches into a pocket of his new jacket and pulls out the picture of the humans he took from the room at the time of his molt. He compares what he sees now with the face that is his in the picture.

Yes, this is the way he is meant to look.

“What you got there, palsy?” says Mite. He steps toward the chair, looks down at the picture. “There you are. I didn’t know you was married. Boy, she’s a looker, ain’t she?”

“Hubba hubba hubba,” says Kockroach as he stares at the female in the picture. She has light hair, like the female known as Sylvie, but she reminds him of the female known as Celia.

“Where she at now?” asks Mite.

Kockroach shrugs his shoulders.

“She die on you or what?”

“Or what.”

“Oh man, women will get you every time, won’t they? That’s why I stay away from them. I gots a weak heart, the doctors they told my momma that when I was a tyke. But that’s what’s so good about them girls in the Square. They’re always there for you. Even when theys with someone else, grab a cup of joe, a cig, and next thing you know it’ll be your turn at the wheel. You ready for some trucking?”

“Ready for some trucking.”

“Good. Let’s go find Sylvie.”

The female with the yellow hair known as Sylvie holds Kockroach’s claw as she leads him down a hallway. The shiny black leathers strapped to the tips of her legs, with their sharp spikes, clack on the rough wooden floor but he can barely hear the sound beneath the roar in his head. He sniffs the air, her sweet floral scent, shakes his head, the roar grows louder. This is more like it, absolutely. He slows his step to watch the twitch of her tail but the woman pulls him forward. He lurches into her and the roar turns into a tempest.

She stops at a door. He lurches into her once again. He rubs against her as she fits a key into the lock and turns it. She spins around until she is facing him, her arms behind her, her mounds against his own flat chest. She grimaces at him and brays. He places his claws on either side of his forehead and reaches out two digits like two antennae. She tilts her head and brays again.

“You’re a crazy one, you are,” she says.

“Sweet pea,” he says, wagging his digits.

“You’re certifiable, you are.”

“Sweet pea, sweet pea, sweet pea.”

She stares for a moment at his wagging digits and then places her claws at the same positions on her own head, raises two of her digits into antennae. He reaches down to rub his antennae against hers. She rubs back, her braying turning to squeals.

“Sweet pea, sweet pea, sweet pea, sweet pea.”

He leans down to bite her. She pushes him away, turns, opens the door, falls into the room.

He lunges in after her.

The mating ritual of the cockroach differs slightly from species to species within the order, but is generally initiated by the female, who raises her wings and secretes powerful pheromones from a special membrane on her back. Sensors in the male antennae pick up the sweet pheromonal scent from as far away as thirty feet and direct the male to the ready female. This release of pheromone can be accompanied by stridulatory singing or hissing by one or both sexes to help bring the partners together. Some cockroach songs comprise as many as six complex pulse trains, a melody more musically advanced, actually, than many Ramones songs.

When a sexually receptive female and male cockroach do finally meet face to face, they begin whipping and lashing each other over and over with their antennae. Antennae fencing serves to excite the varied sensory receptors up and down the antennae, which begin to tingle as the two cockroaches are near overwhelmed by tactile and chemical stimuli. This electrically charged S&M foreplay can last as long as two minutes among certain European species, though it has been observed to be remarkably abbreviated or ignored altogether by the male American cockroach, which often simply charges and thrusts its genitals at the female. Scientists have wondered if this behavior explains the infestations of female American cockroaches in the holds of transatlantic flights landing in Paris.

Foreplay over, the male cockroach displays a peculiar lack of interest by turning his back on the female. It is a feint of course, unalloyed sexual interest is the singular characteristic shared by males of all animal species. With his back turned, the male cockroach curls the tip of his abdomen downward, bends his legs to lower his head and thorax, and raises his wings to a sixty-degree angle, revealing a lobe on his seventh abdominal tergite. This lobe, called an excitator, releases the male’s sex pheromone, called seducin. The male’s excitator is small and bristly and yet irresistible to the female, like a cone of rocky road or a medical degree.

Overwhelmed by the seducin and fooled by the male’s submissive posture, the female steps forward, climbs upon the male’s back, wraps her legs around his torso, and begins to nuzzle and lick the excitator.

Suddenly the male pushes backwards, arches his abdomen, and extends his genitals toward those of the female. The longest of the male’s genital hooks reaches up and clamps itself onto the abdominal tip of the female. Once this connection is made, two other smaller hooks reach into the slim genital orifice of the female and grab hold, forming an unbreakable bond between male and female.

The female, as if in reaction to the male’s sudden brutal move, tries to escape from the male and break off contact. She is able at first to move only sideways, stepping off his back and around and around until, still hooked up, she is facing directly away from him.

In this position, tip to tip, the male’s genitals reaching deep inside the female’s, the struggle stops and male and female this
way remain, for an hour at least, sometimes far longer, one inside the other, together, motionless except for the slow internal humming of their bodies. They stay connected long enough for the male to slowly transfer to the female an oval-shaped packet called a spermatophore, filled to the brim with sperm.

After copulation, it is cockroach tradition for the female to relax with a dose of urates, a supplemental source of nitrogen donated by the male. In some species, the urates are contained in the shell of the spermatophore itself. After the sperm cells are drained, the spermatophore is pushed out of the abdomen and devoured by the female. In other species, after copulation, the male will raise its wings, direct the tip of his abdomen toward his mate, and from special glands secrete a whitish urate-rich ooze, which is swallowed by the female in a feast that can last many minutes. This part of the process can often be seen, late at night, on the tiny televisions in arthropod motels. With no females to swallow this whitish ooze, an excess of urates can accumulate in the male’s body, bit by bit in a toxic swell, until the male’s own urates eventually poison him, or so young male cockroaches often claim.

The mating ritual completed, the male cockroach parts, quickly, washes his claws of the entire enterprise, and hurries off. Male cockroaches are positively Washingtonian in their determination to avoid foreign entanglements and hold no interest in the newborn nymphs that emerge from the female’s egg capsule many days later, except as a quick snack if hunger strikes. Once safely away, the male cockroach feeds and defecates, scratches his belly, lays a few bets on the silverfish, and awaits the next intoxicating whiff of female pheromone.

Kockroach, feeling more himself than he has since the strange molt, stares at his face in the mirror. He rubs his teeth with a digit of his claw. He twists his ears. Fully dressed now in his cloths, he squeezes his tie tight and places his hat on his head at the jaunty angle. It is time, he knows in his bones, to leave.

Something scurries across the sink. He lifts a glass, turns it over, traps the small brown thing. He leans forward to examine his prize. It is a cockroach. Slowly he lifts the glass. The cockroach remains motionless.

Kockroach reaches down a single digit and gently pets the back of the arthropod. The cockroach seems to lift higher on its legs, responding to the touch.

On the pad where they mated, he sees the female with the yellow hair, Sylvie. She is lying naked, twisted in the white cloths. Her eyes are open and they follow him as he walks about the room. Her grimace is soft and dreamy. As she looks at him, she opens her arms, revealing the mounds on her thorax, two large whitish things, one slightly bigger than the other, both with dark brown tips. Kockroach feels roaring through him the strange desire to fall upon his bent legs and place the dark brown tips in his mouth. But even stronger is the craving to flee. It grows within him like a sickness.

“Gotta run, sweet pea,” he says.

“So soon, handsome?”

“Blatta, blatta, blatta.”

“You know where I’ll be.”

“Lucky me,” he says.

Before he leaves he takes from his wallet a few green papers, as a tribute. He places them on the small table next to the pad, beside the glass which he filled in the bathroom, its amber fluid reaching almost to the rim, its uric acid rich in nitrogen.

Kockroach finds Mite outside the building, leaning against the wall by the door, tossing a silver disk into the air.

“Took your time, didn’t you?” says Mite.

“I’m from out of town.”

“Aw hell, it’s the same everywhere, ain’t it? Except maybe in New Orleans, what with all the Frenchies there.”

“Want to have some fun, honey? You look like you could use it.”

“I got no time for such distractions,” says Mite. “There’s business to attend. You ready?”

“Ready.”

“Remember what I told you? How to play it?”

“Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.”

“Absolutely.”

Kockroach takes out his wallet and from the wallet takes out the green pieces of paper. “This,” he says.

“Oh yeah, don’t you know it. We’re going to be drowning in it, you and me. That’s what it’s all about.”

“What it’s all about.”

“The pineapple pie.”

Kockroach sticks out his long pink tongue and licks his lips.

“You got it, palsy. It’s you and me, partners to the end.”

“Partners.”

“Attaboy.” Mite pushes himself off the wall and starts to walk down the street. “All right, partner, it’s off to see the wizard.”

Was a geezer
what hung around the Square name of Tony the Tune, on account of he was always humming to hisself. Missing half his teeth, bent back, wild white hair, voice like a frog, hum hum hum, crazy old Tony the Tune. Had enough money from somewheres that each night at the Automat he would buy hisself from the steam table a Salisbury steak, with masheds and broccoli, two rolls with butter, pick up a cup of joe from the big metal urn, a wedge of lemon meringue from the wall. Many was the night I nursed my single cup of tea and stared longingly as the old mope sat alone and hummed some cheery song to hisself whilst he sopped up the gravy with a thickly buttered roll.

“Hey, Tony. I got something coming down this week, but I’m a little short right now. You got thirty-nine cents you could lend me just till Tuesday?”

“Get away from me, you little scalawag,” he’d spit at me. “I got no time to waste on the likes of you.”

Tony the Tune.

So one night, Tony started coming into the Automat with some beefy-looking pretty-boy blond with dark eyes and arms like legs. Old Tony would shuffle in and the blond
would follow behind with his bouncy step. When they sats down at Tony’s table, the blond boy’s tray would be groaning with sandwiches and fruit and heaping helpings from the steam table while Tony’s tray would have a single orange and a cup of water. Whatever money he had coming in, see, was enough to feed the boy but not hisself in addition, see. They’d sit together and Tony would spend the whole meal patting the boy’s hand, whispering in his ear, opening his milk cartons, humming some Sousa march, fetching straws and napkins, buying more food if the pile on the tray wasn’t enough to fill the boy’s gob.

I figured Tony for a queen in love, simple as that, but it was Sylvie what set me straight. Tony styled hisself a boxing aficionado, spent his days picking up towels at the Gramercy Gym on Fourteenth Street, looking to get his mitts on a palooka with a chance. Now any fighter with any kind of promise could find hisself a sharper manager than old Tony the Tune, so Tony was left to scrape the canvas for the sad saps with slow hands and glass jaws what were dead meat afore ever they stepped into a ring. A no-chancer, such was Tony’s boy, a colorful pug only so long as the colors they was black and blue.

A few weeks after it started, the boy followed Tony in one night but he wasn’t so pretty no more. His left eye was closed on him, his maw was a swollen mess, his nose busted but good. That night it was soup and milk and pudding mixed with cream, all sucked down by the palooka through a straw. It wasn’t long afore Tony started again to come in alone, humming his tunes
and ordering his Salisbury steak and masheds and broccoli and two rolls with butter. We never again spied the pretty-boy blond who wasn’t so pretty no more.

If you asked me then, I would have told you Tony the Tune was the worst kind of fool, starving hisself so some no-chancer could prove exactly what he was. The worst kind of fool, a fool in love with hope. Because Hubert, that sack of nothing what sacked my ma, he seeks out hope, like he seeks out fear, waits for the instant when hope wanes to rise up and seize your soul. My momma, she showed me that. Tony the Tune was Hubert bait without even knowing it. But suddenly, with the coming of Jerry Blatta into my life, I had a whole new understanding of the grumpy old mope. See, even though I knew the dire consequences of relying on hope alone, I couldn’t bring myself to reject its blandishments neither. So just like Tony, I brought my hope into the Automat, loaded his tray with food, groomed him for a shot at the title.

I had my doubts about Jerry Blatta to be sure. Like when I put him to bed the night we met, sacking out myself on the floor so he could have the mattress. I woke the next morning to find Blatta buck naked and curled into a ball beneath the bedsprings. What that was all about I never figured. Or when I noticed he put his legs through the armholes of his undershirt and pulled it up as high as he could. I had to near bite my lip through to stop my laughing at that. He was a queer one, and I had my doubts, but I had no doubt at all about what he had done to Roscoe. And so, when the choice was to save what I needed to pay off Big Johnny or to spring the bills I needed to clean up my Suzy like he needed to be cleaned, I
sprang, yes I did. I spent like a fool in love on Jerry Blatta.

Let me tell you something, missy. You want to know who it was what made the Boss all he is today, the sweet-dressing, sweet-talking man-on-the-rise? You’re looking at him, yes you are. Kiss me twice and call me Charlie.

So there we was, the two of us, strutting up the Great White Way. Can’t you see us? Me in the front like a herald of sorts, and Jerry Blatta behind, drawing attention what with his fancy new double-breasted suit and dark glasses, his sharp cheekbones, his syncopated jazzy jazz walk, the lit cig bobbing in his lips, the cocky air of the newly laid. He was a sight, he was, as Times Square as Georgie M. hisself, who was so Times Square they gave him a statue. Jerry Blatta, bucking for a statue of his own, following behind as I led him north through the Square. And then a few blocks west, past all them restaurants, one next to the other, French and Irish and Spanish and Italian, a whole marketplace of cheap European cuisine, until we reached a Greek joint called the Acropolis, where in the back room the
Nonos,
what ran all the rackets in Times Square, held court.

Whoa, that perked you up in a hurry, hey, missy? A little organized crime never hurt a story, did it?

Abagados. The
Nonos
. Which in Greek means Godfather, or maybe murderous bastard, either one, didn’t much matter the way things played out. Was a time the very whisper of his name sent a shiver through the Square. Prostitution, drugs, extortion, loan-sharking, pocket-picking, tit-shaking, cheap booze, cheap cigs, the more than occasional heist, the more than occasional murder. Abagados ruled his midtown empire
from a room behind the kitchen of the Acropolis, hiring soldiers like Big Johnny Callas to patrol his streets, and he took a cut out of every crime and caper what went down, from the garment district, through the theater district, into the restaurant district, and beyond. He was a shadowy figure, no pictures in the press, no gossip in the columns, I couldn’t have ID’d him if he strolled up and bit my nose, but every step I took as I struggled to slip a score out from under his shadow, I felt the terrible weight of his power.

And word was out on the street that Abagados, no longer content to feast on midtown, was getting ready to expand south and north and east, into territory controlled by the coloreds, the Italians, the Jews, oh my, getting ready to expand and looking to build an army.

“What fug you doing here, Mite? Get hell out afore Yonni, he take off your head.”

“Yo, Stavros, it’s sweet seeing you too,” I says. “Is Nemo around?”

Stavros, tall and thin with a black fedora and an absurd black mustache, jumped off his stool at the bar of the Acropolis and lifted both his long palms at me like a copper stopping traffic.

“I’m no kidding, Mite. Word is Yonni gonna make example you. He tells whole world he reach in you throat and pull out you
arhidis
.”

“Yeah, well, whatever the hell that means, let him try.”

“But the
Nonos,
he don’t want no trouble in restaurant.”

“Well then I picked the safest spot in New York, didn’t I, Stavros, old pal? I need to see Nemo.”

The bar sat in front of a huge mural of a bunch of maidens la-di-daing around a pile of ruins. The main dining room off to the left was near to full with the pretheater crowd sawing on their kebabs or cutting into great squares of moussaka, while waiters doused burning bits of goat cheese with juice squeezed from lemon wedges to enthusiastic shouts of “Oooopa.” The band, three men in puffy shirts and red vests, played maudlin Greek melodies with tears rolling down their cheeks.

Stavros takes a step toward me, like he’s about to bounce me out of the joint, when he spies the man behind me.

“Who laughing boy?”

“His name’s Blatta.” I close an eye and thinks for a moment. “Jerzy Blatta.”

“He Greek?”

“How the hell should I know? I didn’t check his papers. Look, Blatta and me, we needs to see Nemo.”

“He no here for you.”

“It’s important, Stavros. And believe me, it’ll be worth his while.”

“He no here. Now spam you.”

“The word is scram. Spam is what you feeds the touristas here and call it souvlaki. And the answer is no. I came to see Nemo. I’ll just check for myself to see if he’s around.”

As I push by him, Stavros grabs hold of me. Two other boneheads with fedoras at the bar jump off theys stools and reach into theys jackets as if about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Boys, boys, boys,” I says. “Good to see you all. You’re looking swell. But you might want to step aside or I’ll start to
screaming bloody murder, I swears I will. Won’t the
Nonos
like that, me screaming like a siren here in his quiet little restaurant? If you think that gut scraper on the violin can screech, wait till you gets a load of me. Ready?”

I takes a deep breath, screws up my face, open my mouth wide, like I’m about to make like some fat lady with horns, when Stavros, he lets loose my arm.

“Wait here,” says Stavros to me. “I go see if Nemo, he wants talk to a
malakas
like you.”

A few minutes later Stavros returned, followed by a huge round man who squeezed through the doorway from the kitchen and made his way to the bar. The man had no neck, lips like Capone, a cigarette was held daintily in his thick fingers. Fat Nemo.

Nemo was some sort of high underboss—the hierarchy of the Abagados organization was always Dutch to me—and yet seemed a decent sort for a gangster. As he made his tours through the Square, oozing his bulk down the crowded streets with Big Johnny Callas and Stavros behind him, he was all smiles and glad hands, tossing cigarettes and bills to the beggars, caressing the heads of the hookers with his fat fingers, buying rounds at the taverns he stepped into so as to renegotiate the payment schedules. And whenever he passed my way he always had a warm word of greeting.
How is it with you, Mite? Dressing mighty sharp this evening, Mite. Someday, Mite, you and me, we’re going to do some business
.

“Mite,” says Nemo, leaning now on the bar of the Acropolis, fiddling carelessly with his cigarette, his grin a little less
genuine, more pained, than on the street. “A pleasure as always to see your smiling face. I’d invite you back but it is a private party. Let me instead buy you a drink.” Nemo gestured to the bartender. “A glass of retsina for my friend Mite. And another for his friend…”

“Jerzy,” I says. “Jerzy Blatta.”

“Aaah, a fellow countryman perhaps? Then please, use one of our imported bottles, none of that swill we mix up in the bathtub.”

The bartender, a lean dark man with hair plastered back, replaced the unmarked bottle in his hand with another, foggy on the outside, sweetly pink on the inside, and filled two of them water glasses like they had at the Automat. I took a sip, sharp like turpentine. I nodded at Blatta and he downed his in one swallow. His eyebrows, they danced just above his dark glasses.

“Now, Mite, I need to get back to the party, so please be brief.”

“Word on the Square, Nemo, is you boys is soldiering up.”

Nemo carefully raised his cigarette to his lips. “The word?”

“That’s right.”

Nemo stared down at me as he inhaled. “On the Square.”

“The word.”

“And you think you, you are the very soldier we may be looking for?”

“Absolutely.”

Nemo blew the smoke out in a stream above my head.
“Let me be frank, my friend. I have craps bigger than you.”

“That just mean you’re eating well, Nemo, and I’m glad to hear it. But it’s not only me I’m talking about.”

Nemo tilted his head.

“My palsy Jerzy.”

“Is that so?” Nemo turned his attention to Blatta. “I haven’t seen you around before, Jerzy.”

“He’s new in the Square,” I says.

“I’m from out of town,” says Blatta.

“You got much experience there, Jerzy? You a fighting man? You single-handedly destroyed a regiment of Japs in the war?”

Blatta didn’t say nothing, he just smiled his smile and Nemo’s eyes they narrowed.

“Thank you for thinking of me, Mite, but I’ve no need now of your help. And I particularly have no need for strangers from out of town who as far as I know couldn’t slap their way out of a pita.”

“But Nemo,” I says, “you don’t understand.”

“I do, Mite,” he says, leaning forward now, his great bulk towering uneasily over me. “Believe me, I do. We don’t want nobody nobody sent. The cops are pouring all kinds of finger men into the street to snitch for them, all kinds of lowlifes. And you, Mite, are about the lowest life I know. So now you might want to leave before Johnny steps through that door.”

His gaze passes over my shoulder and a dark grin appears.

“Too late,” he says.

I didn’t need to turn around to know what Nemo was grinning at, the hairs what pricked up on the back of my neck
told me as clearly as any mirror. It was Johnny Callas, Big Johnny, what with the fists and the temper, bopping into the restaurant, two of his lackeys following tight behind. He’d be in a fancy suit, no hat to mar the thick slick of blue-black hair, his broad shoulders and deep chest bobbing up and down as he pointed first to his left, then to his right, acknowledging associates here, clients there, bobbing and pointing as he made his way to the center of the bar where stood yours truly, facing away from him. And it didn’t matter that I was facing away from him, he’d know who I was right off. There wasn’t too many guys my size who worked the Square, and none in a suit as green as mine.

“I been looking for you, you little parasite,” he says.

“Johnny, I’m sorry. I’m trying—” I says. But before I turns around fully, I slams his fist with my face and flip sprawling onto to my back.

“You little parasite,” he says, leaning over me now. He sucks his teeth and slaps me on the face. “I give you the two bills for your deal of a lifetime and what do I get in return? Nothing. And then you score on Roscoe and clean him out and what do you do with that cash? You buy a fancy suit, a good sweat, a fancy shave, you splurge at the Automat and buy a ride from Sylvie. You get all that and what do I get? Nothing. You little parasite. I’m going to take you apart. But before I do, I want my five C’s.”