Manhattan Is My Beat (16 page)

“Rune,” Tony said, “this is Stephanie. Isn’t she pretty? Great hair, don’t you think? Why don’t you show our beautiful new employee the ropes? I’m going to the health club.”

He sucked his gut in, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and pushed out the door.

Isn’t she pretty, got great hair
…

Rune stepped on the jealousy long enough to say to Stephanie, “Thanks. I don’t know what to say. I can’t really afford to get fired right now.”

“Oh, I’ve been there.” Stephanie glanced at the door as Tony disappeared down the street. “So
he’s
really in a health club?”

“You bet he is,” Rune whispered.

Then said, “Burger King,” at the same time Stephanie said, “McDonald’s?” They burst into laughter.

“You don’t want to get the straight and gay adult mixed up when you’re putting them back,” Rune was explaining.

“Right. You don’t.” The woman
did
have incredible hair—long red-blond strands that tumbled over her shoulders the way hair seems to do only in shampoo commercials.

“What’s your name again?” Rune now asked her. It started with an S. But she had a lot of problems with S names. Susan, Sally, Suzanne …

“Stephanie.”

Right. Rune stored it away in her brain and continued with the training session. “See, we don’t have covers on the porn so people have to rent them by the titles. With some it’s easy.
Soldier Boys, Cowboy Rubdown, Muscle Truckers
, you know? But some, you can’t tell. We had one guy rent
Big Blonds
, only it turns out that blondes with an
E on the end is girl blondes and
without
the E is boy blonds. Did you know that? I didn’t. Anyway, he got boys with big dicks and he wanted girls with big boobs. He wasn’t happy. Hey, your hair
is
totally radical. Is that your real color?”

“For now it is.” Stephanie examined Rune’s arm. “Love your bracelets.”

“Yeah?” Rune shook her arm. They jingled.

Stephanie said, “Someone wanted me to do a porn movie once. In L.A. This guy said he was a UCLA film grad. Came right up to me in a coffee shop—I was hanging, reading
Variety
—and asked me if I wanted to do skin flick.”

“No kidding,” Rune said. Nobody’d ever asked her to do a porn film. She was wondering if she should feel insulted.

Stephanie paused, looking at a poster for
Gaslight
. “Ingrid Bergman. She was beautiful.”

“Even with short hair,” Rune said. “Like in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.” She ran her fingers over her head. Patted the strands down again. Thought about a wig. “The porn, did you do it?”

“Naw. Just didn’t seem right.”

“I’d be scared to death of, you know, catching something.”

Stephanie shrugged. “Where’d you get them? The bracelets?”

“Everywhere. I’ll be walking down the street and then there’s this feeling I get and it’s a bracelet calling me. Next store I come to, bang, there’s one in the window.”

Stephanie looked at her skeptically.

“It happens. I swear to God.”

“Tony said you were slacking off.”

“Every minute I spend not making his life easier is his definition of slacking off. What it is, this friend of mine
got murdered. And I’m trying to find out what happened.”

“No!”

“Yeah.”

Stephanie said, “I got carjacked in Hollywood. I was in a Honda. You wouldn’t think anybody’d kill somebody for a Honda. But I thought they were going to shoot me. I let ‘em take it. They just drove off. Stopped at a stop sign and signaled to make a right turn. Like nothing’d happened. Doesn’t it seem weird they’d kill you for a car? Or even just a few hundred dollars?”

Or for a
million
dollars, Rune thought. Seeing in her mind’s eye Robert Kelly, lying back in his chair. The bullet holes in his chest. And the one in the TV.

Stephanie added, “I took a self-defense course after that. But that doesn’t do you any good against a guy with a gun.”

Rune pushed the sad thoughts from her mind and walked through the shelves, putting the tapes back, gesturing Stephanie after her.

“You’ll learn stuff, working here. About human nature. That’s why I took the job. Of course I don’t exactly know what to do with the human nature I learn. But it’s still fun to watch people. I’m a voyeur, I think.”

“What can you learn about people in a video store?”

“How’s a for-instance? There’s this guy, cute, a stockbroker, always smelled like garlic but I flirted with him anyway. He rents all these Charles Bronson films, Chuck Norris, Schwarzenegger. Then he shows up here one night and he’s got this yuppie trendoid girl hanging on him like he’s a trapeze, okay? Suddenly no more
Commando
. All he wants are things like
The Seventh Seal
and Fellini and a lot of the recent Woody Allen—you know, not
Bananas
but the relationship stuff. And things you’d see on PBS, right? That lasts for a month, then Miss Culture goes bye-bye and it’s back to
Death Wish 8
for a
couple months. Then he comes in with some other girl all in leather and studs. I know what you’re thinking but guess what she likes? Old musicals. Dorothy Lamour, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Fred and Ginger. That’s all he rents for
two
months. Guy’s going to develop a complex. I mean, you’ve gotta be yourself, right?”

Stephanie was brushing her hair.

Rune continued. “Like, speaking of adult films … Oh, don’t call them dirty movies. Tony doesn’t like that, and besides, it’s a mega-business. We make forty percent of our gross on them even though they’re only twelve percent of inventory…. Well, what I was saying was that now women rent almost as many as men. And they don’t rent all that much straight … mostly it’s gay male flicks.”

“Yeah?” Stephanie’s sullen eyes flashed with a splinter of interest then the lids lowered again. The brush went back into her purse. Rune decided Stephanie would be a Washington Square Video employee for thirty days max. She could get just as boring work in restaurants and the pay would be three times as good. “Why would women rent gay films?”

“Way I figure it,” Rune said, “it’s that the guys in gay films look a lot better than guys in straight films, you know, they’re really hunks, cut. Work out, take care of themselves. Straight films, you see a lot of flab … I’ve heard.”

Stephanie, glancing with boredom at the adult section, said, “Lesbians are out of luck, sounds like.”

“Naw, naw, that’s another good market. We’ve got, let’s see,
Girls on Girls, Lesbos Lovers, Sappho Express
… But it’s mostly men rent those. There’re more girlfriends over in the West Village. Not so many here.”

Rune walked back to the counter, fluffed her hair out with her fingers. Stephanie looked at it, said, “That’s an interesting effect, with the colors. How did you do it?”

“I don’t know. It just kind of happened.” Trying to figure if her comment was a compliment. Rune didn’t think so.
Interesting
. That’s a bitch of a word.
Interesting
.

“You have any freaks come in?”

Rune said, “Depends on what you mean. There’s a guy knows every line—even the TV and radio broadcasts—in
Night of the Living Dead
. Then this lawyer told me he and his wife rent
Casablanca
after they have sex. And I can look up in the computer and tell you that they must be having problems. There’s this one guy, Mad Max, he’s real creepy and always rents slasher films. Those stupid things like
Halloween
and
Friday the 13th, Part 85
, you know.”

“Sexist bastards,” Stephanie said, “that’s who makes those films.”

“But turns out he’s a social worker for a big hospital uptown and volunteers for Meals on Wheels, things like that.”

“Seriously?”

“I keep telling you … a video store is a great education.”

Stephanie said, “You have a boyfriend?”

“I’m not sure,” Rune said. She decided this was a pretty accurate statement.

“Is Rune your real name?”

“For now it is.”

A queue formed—and Rune walked Stephanie through the check-out procedure.

“I can’t believe this is your first day. You’re a born clerk,” Rune told her.

“Thanks loads,” Stephanie drawled. “Don’t tell Tony, but what I’m hoping is I’ll meet some producers or casting agents here. I want to be an actress. Just a dry spell right now. I haven’t auditioned for a month.”

“What about all those casting calls in L.A.?”

“A casting call doesn’t mean you get the part. L.A. is yucky. New York’s the only place to be.”

“I
knew
I liked you,” Rune said, and rented
The Seven Samurai, Sleeping Beauty
, and
Lust Orgy
to a pleasant, balding businessman.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The rivers are moats, the buildings are parapets
…

Wait, is that right? What exactly is a parapet?

Anyway …

The buildings are parapets. The stone, pitted and stained with age and cloudy water. Dripping. Slick stalactites and stalagmites. Dark windows with bars on the dungeons. We’re riding down, down, down … The hooves of our horses muted by the cold brick. Down into the secret entrance that leads under the moat, out of the Magic Kingdom, out of the Side
.

Richard guided the old Dodge into the Holland Tunnel and headed for New Jersey.

“Isn’t it wild?” Rune asked. The orange lights flashed by, the gassy sweet smell of exhaust flowing into the car.

“What?”

“There is probably a hundred feet of water and yuck on top of us right now. That’s really something.”

He looked dubiously up at the yellowing ceiling of the tunnel, above which the Hudson River was flowing into New York Harbor.

“Something,” he said uneasily.

It was
his
car, the Dodge they were in. This was pretty odd. Richard lived in Manhattan and he actually owned a car. Anybody who did that had to have a pretty conventional side to them after all. Paying taxes and parking and registration fees. This bothered her some but she wasn’t really complaining. It turned out that the nursing home where the writer of
Manhattan Is My Beat
lived was forty miles from the city and she couldn’t afford to rent wheels for this part of her quest.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

And they drove through the rest of the claustrophobic yellow tunnel in silence. Rune was careful; when men got moody, it could be a real pisser. Put them with their buddies, let ‘em get drunk and snap their jocks and throw footballs or lecture you about Buñuel or how airplane wings work and they were fine. But, holy St. Peter, something serious comes up—especially with a woman involved—and they go all to pieces.

But after twenty minutes, when they were out of the tunnel, Richard seemed to relax. He put his hand on her leg. More sparks. How the hell does that happen? she wondered.

Rune looked around as they headed for the Turnpike. “Gross.” The intersections were filled with stoplight poles and wires and mesh fences and gas stations. She looked for her favorite service station logo—Pegasus—and didn’t see one. That’s what they needed, a winged horse to fly them over this mess.