The Art of Disposal (19 page)

“How 'bout you, Ronnie. You tough?”

“Don't need to be. All I do is void warranties.”

“How many you voided?”

“Enough,” I said.

Carlino laughed. “And if I end up running this crew?”

“I'll learn to live with it,” I said.

“Gets me away from that Mudcap,” Carlino said. “I heard you met him.”

I thought about the day Mudcap drove me to LaGuardia. He was a good driver. He put in a CD—The Bill Evans Trio's
Moonbeams
—and he never talked once, not once, the whole way to the airport. That peaceful ride was nothing but tinkly piano keys, slinky basslines, brushed snare-drums, and dirty city-scapes. He went the speed limit and used his turn signals. He even got out of the car, opened the trunk, and handed me my duffel bag when we pulled up to the terminal. It was such a relaxing trip, I almost gave him a tip.

“He has good taste in music,” I said.

“Oh yeah. Like what?”

“Bill Evans.”

“Bob Evans?” Carlino said with a weird twist of his head.

“
Bill
Evans. Jazz piano.”

“I hate jazz,” Carlino said.

“Of course you do.”

“Drugged-up Darkies,” Carlino said.

“So who do you like?”

“The Stones, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix. You know,
real
music.”

“Isn't Jimi Hendrix black?” I said.

“He's pretty light-skinned though,” Carlino said and nodded his head, like he was giving his approval.

We parked and went into the mall. Once those glass mall-doors whoosh closed behind you, it might as well be anywhere in the U.S.A. It's all the same anymore: crummy stores and spoiled ADHD teenagers bitching about their rotten American lives while they shop for Anarchy t-shirts at the Hot Topic.

We must have looked pretty odd: Carlino with his maroon velor tracksuit, and me in a buttondown shirt and speckled tie.

I watched the way Carlino strutted along, like some ridiculous oily bird, nodding and smiling at each halfway decent girl who passed, and cocking his head around to fully examine their departing asses. Real East Coast trash. That's one thing the mob movies get right: there really are guys who wear tracksuits, gold chains, and pinky rings; and they really have wives and girlfriends who pluck out their real eyebrows and draw in fake ones with a black pen. And they all swagger around, confident that the universe really does revolve around them.

We grabbed some coffees and took a seat in the food court, and for a few minutes we both just gazed around at the different sets of people, coming and going. Moms with “how did this happen to me?” faces, pushing double-wide baby-strollers; slumped and scrawny teenage boys with their pants so far off of their asses that they could only walk, duck-like, with one hand on their belt to constantly hitch the pants back up, over and over again, in an endless rhythm of idiocy.

“Look at that kid,” Carlino said as a few of them went by. “Pull your fuckin' pants up. Jesus. What's the world coming to? I swear, I thought this pants-off-your-ass thing would have ended years ago, but no: it's still going strong. Maybe one day we'll have a president, and he'll walk out to give a speech, and you'll look down, and that'll be his pants. Right there.”

About three sips into his coffee, Carlino swiveled his head around and fixed his gaze on something with a frightening level of intensity. I thought it must be a person, but he stood up and told me to go along with him to the arcade.

It was the claw machine: that boxy beacon of consumerism that tempts kids to feed it quarters with dreams of a plush toy. Carlino walked up to it, set his coffee on top of it, and started digging fruitlessly in his pocket for a quarter.

“You got some quarters?” he said.

I handed him two.

“I never lose,” he said.

“You're crazy. They're rigged.”

“I know how to do it. I grew up around this thing.”

Carlino dropped in the fifty cents, sent the claw directly over a toy honeybee, and hit the drop button; and sure enough, the bee came up, perfectly centered in the grip of the flimsy metal claw. Then it dropped the toy into the chute.

“Yay!” a little kid in a striped shirt said. He'd crept up to watch the action.

“It's got your name on it,” Carlino said, and handed the stuffed bee to the kid. Then he gave me a twenty dollar bill. “Get me some quarters, Sam.”

For the next twenty minutes, Carlino must have pulled two dozen toys out of the claw machine, and we soon had a crowd of eager kids, each claiming the next prize out of the machine, and generally buzzing with excitement. It was true: he never lost. The crowd of kids drew the attention of a short, paunchy security guard wearing a cheap-looking copper badge. He put his hand on his radio, and walked over to us.

“How you doing?” he said to Carlino.

Carlino ignored him and put some more quarters in the machine.

“You here with your kids?” the guard said to me.

“Don't have any,” I said.

“How's about him?”

“You got any kids, D-T?” I said.

“None that I know of,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the game.

“What's two grown men doing at an arcade?”

“Playing games,” Carlino said.

“Did you break that machine?” the guard said. His lip quivered, and he rolled his fingers across the top of his radio like it was a gun in a holster, and we were all in front of a wild west saloon at high noon. Carlino stopped playing the claw game and inched right up to the guard.

“I like this game,” he said, “but I'm a little too old to keep the toys.”

“We'd prefer it if you moved along,” the guard said.

“Oh yeah?” Carlino said.

“Let's go,” I said. “No use starting trouble.” I looked right at the guard. “We're just meeting up with an old friend in the courtyard. He's running a little late. We're bored, that's all.”

“Look at this guy,” Carlino said. “Barney Fuckin' Fife.”

The guard could barely swallow, and beads of sweat were breaking on his forehead. I don't think he'd ever had to deal with anything rougher than a gang of pimply sixteen-year-olds. Carlino smiled and stopped harassing him. “We're going, Sam, we're going. Take it easy,” he said.

We took our old seats in the courtyard. Bullfrog showed up and tapped me on the shoulder. He and Carlino shook hands and traded hellos. Then Carlino ran back to the arcade to grab his forgotten coffee from the top of the claw machine. Bullfrog said to me:

“This guy. He cool?”

“Eh,” I said. “But he knows his business.” Then I told Bullfrog about how he'd won all of those toys in a row, and how I'd never seen anything like it.

“Ain't they rigged?” Bullfrog said, pointing at the machine, when Carlino sat back down.

“Sort of. But all you gotta do is line that claw up just right. Figure out what you want to grab and then stay focused on it.”

“Sounds metaphorical,” Bullfrog said.

“Meta-what?” Carlino said.

“You a New Yorker?”

“Born and raised.”

“Last one of these new cats I was 'sposed to trust, he killed my friend. Hated black folks. How's about you? You scared'a black folks?”

“Only when I see a bunch of 'em, late at night,” Carlino said.

Bullfrog laughed and laced his fingers together. “My Auntie, she always taught me how white folks is crazier than black folks.” He made his voice sound like an old woman's. “You won't never see no black man a'serial killin' no sweet young schoolgirls.”

“She's right,” I said. “For the most part.”

“I ain't white,” Carlino said, “I'm Italian.”

“Oh… he's
Italian
,” Bullfrog said. “My bad. That ain't white a'tall. Just once I'd like to meet one of you wiseguys who don't have a problem with brothers.”

I raised my hand and said, “I don't have a problem with brothers.”

“Hell, son, you ain't no wiseguy,” Bullfrog said.

“What is he then?” Carlino said, smiling.

“He just here to make money, son. No one else'll hire this fool. He look like a wiseguy to you? Nah. He look more like a lie-bear-ian. I ain't never seen nothin' whiter than that tie right there he got on. Look like his Ma done picked it out for him to go to the senior prom!”

Carlino busted up. I let the jabs go right through me, and I even laughed along. When some guys poke fun at you, they don't really mean it: there are no knives in their soul. It's how you say a thing that makes it really hurtful. Sure, Bullfrog deals drugs to pay his bills, but his heart is more pure than half of America's CEOs, squashing plebeian pensions and retirements without remorse. And they're hypocrites. Guys in polo shirts at golf courses only look down on street thugs like Bullfrog until they need an eight-ball on a Friday night.

Carlino and Bullfrog traded stories, and I let my mind kind of wander and buzz the way it does when there's just enough background noise, and just enough people walking into and out of my life all around me. I thought about my old job washing dishes at the Hotsy Totsy; how that one simple job changed the course of my life.

It's a lot like anything else, I guess. When you're a kid you think you'll be a major league ball player, or—in my case—a deep sea diver. Then you wake up one day and discover that you're stocking shelves at your local grocery store, or driving a cab in some smoggy city. The universe loves to crush a dream. The string gets pulled along, and we go where it takes us and try to make the best of it. In a parallel world, maybe I have an advanced medical degree and I'm at a national conference on cancer, giving a lecture on angiogenesis inhibitors, and trading notes with Doc Brillman about the best way to stop the tumors in Dan the Man.

Maybe so. But not on this side of the mirror.

I used to get up at four in the morning and walk down the fiery-orange dawn streets to a little bakery. It was just me and some guy named Andy who started the first batches of bread. Then an older lady, Helen I think her name was, would show up and she'd start in on the muffins. Everyone thinks a bakery must smell so good, but you just don't notice it after a while. We used to get a free lunch there, and I'd take a bagel and some cream cheese and go sit out on the deck that looked over a little stream. One day I noticed some rats running along the bank. They had their own city down there, almost like highways and byways through the weeds that took them to all the important places. I took to feeding them, throwing little chunks of my bagel down there across the creek, trying to land them in good spots. It was a real kick to watch them find the pieces and scurry off with them like they'd just discovered an ounce of gold. But I'd only throw the pieces when no one was looking. Most people don't get a guy who throws bread crumbs to rats. Most people throw them poisoned baits.

Then I worked wholesale: the kind of place that sells jars of pickles and mayonnaise the size of oil drums. Forklifts. Pallet Jacks. Break rooms and bathrooms. You can hide out for a long time in a bathroom before anyone notices, lying down on a flattened cardboard box. I did the bare minimum. If you work too hard, they'll bump you up to management, where you're guaranteed a sixty hour work week, a new paunch, three screaming kids, and an alcohol problem. I did meet Emily at a retail job, so I can't say that nothing good ever came from it.

After that it was restaurants. I can cook a damn good meal. Every man and woman, rich and poor, should do at least one year in a crummy diner, like a military obligation when you turn eighteen. You'd see people treating waiters and waitresses a whole lot better, that's for sure. When Emily left, I drifted from city to city, cooking at truckstops and renting cheap rooms, and looking out of black windows at nights that went on. That's how I ended up washing dishes at the Totsy. I was broke, and they didn't need a line cook.

“Hey, Ronnie!” Carlino said, and snapped his fingers. “You still with us?”

I told him I was, and Carlino laid out the basics of the plan. We were hitting a truck full of cameras—the good ones, the top of the line Nikon D4's and Canon Mark III's—off a tip from Creeping Jody, and we wanted to know if Bullfrog was in. It was a real money maker. Most of the cameras were going straight to unscrupulous dealers, but there might be a couple hundred leftover. That's why we needed Bullfrog.

“You give 'em to me, and I'll get rid of 'em,” Bullfrog said.

“You'd like that wouldn't you?” Carlino said. “We do all the work, and you take a chunk of the money.”

“I'm taking a chunk of the risk.”

“Not like we are. You want in, you're in. But that means all the way in.”

“You mean, like, at the truck?”

“Yeah, like, at the truck,” Carlino mimicked. “Piece of cake. Pretend you're hitting a liquor store, with some of your boys in the hood.”

“Hmmmph,” Bullfrog said and folded his arms. “What's my cut, asshole?”

“Well… say you get a hundred leftover cameras. They street for four G's. Sell 'em half off. A hundred times two thousand, that's…”

“Two hundred grand,” I said.

“Yeah. Two hundred G's. Minus the fifty percent you give back to us, of course. But hey—that's a hundred thousand dollar payday, Mister Frog.”

Bullfrog took off his hat. He held it and worked the fabric with his thumbs. It looked like the gears of his mind were spinning with thoughts of a hundred grand, stacked in a neat metal safe.

“What's your real name?” Carlino said.

I was curious about that too. I don't think anyone knew Bullfrog's real name, but I guess no one had ever asked.

“Darnell,” he said.

“Damn!
Dar
-nell. So are you in, Darnell?”

Bullfrog put his hat back on. Nodded slowly. “But no guns—not for me.”

“A brother without a gun? That's like a hotdog without mustard,” Carlino said.

“Yeah? I'll show you where to put that dog.”

“And don't think you won't be working, Sam. Unloading the truck when we get to Jody's. So are you in or what?”

“I'm in,” Bullfrog said.

Eddie told us to go check up on Griffin Shaw. I gave Carlino the details while we were driving up to Eugene the Ukrainian's house, and he sat there picking at his thumbs with the nails of his middle fingers.

“Wait up. He put this guy in a cage and left him to starve and die?”