The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (6 page)

An afternoon of geographical escape and pleasure; I was in a bona fide good mood. I left the library and started to walk home down Fifth Avenue, admiring, as an incalculable number of people had before me, the beauty of the Flatiron Building in sunset. Finally, a day in which I didn’t mind that I was part of a continuum. Saved in the nick of time by Danny Death.

On Fifth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop beckoned me inside. The Eisenberg tuna sandwich (Bumble Bee fancy white albacore moistened by just the right amount of Hellmann’s mayo, a pickle, and a sprig of parsley) would be a perfect cap to the day—a treat I’d missed while in Australia.

Aunt Virginia had taken Frank and me to Eisenberg’s whenever my parents went on their “romantic getaway” weekend bus trips to places like Cape May, New Jersey, or Brandywine Valley, Delaware. Aunt Virginia was, and is, a no-nonsense woman. Everything about Eisenberg’s suited her “just fine”—the Old New York narrow room with the faux-marble counter, zero-pretense red vinyl stools, and water served in promotional cups bought in bulk—in recent times, last summer’s Disney tie-in.

“Your Grandpa Ganelli ate soup here,” she’d remind us if we lobbied for McDonald’s (at the time, the early seventies, the golden arches had but one outlet on East Twenty-third Street, a destination as exotic and inviting as the only intimate café in drive-in suburbia).

I smiled in relief as I took my stool. Some things are constants. Three hand-painted wooden signs were tacked onto the walls, plaques from opening day in 1929:

And a plastic fourth menu from the fifties over to the side:

STEWED PEACHES

J
ELL-
O

PINEAPPLE

GRAPEFRUIT JUICE

TOMATO JUICE

FRUIT SALAD

I greedily accepted my tuna fish sandwich and savored each bite. I imagined Grandpa Ganelli, who I hardly remember, eating sliced meatloaf on a roll, perhaps crossing paths with Mom’s socialist father, Murray Levine, who was probably the first in his five-thousand-year-old line to abandon kosher laws to the temptation of a yummy BLT.

I daydreamed about enrolling in Columbia’s film school, persuading Frieda and Janet to get me into their production assistant circle. Mom had those great PR contacts she was always offering to call. If I borrowed her old Rolodex I could set up some interviews for steady, non–fire extinguisher money. I had a pulse again.

The guy at the far end of the counter wanted to pay his bill. “I
had a tuna salad sandwich, mate,” he said, in a distinct Aussie accent.

I knew that voice. I leaned in close to pinpoint who it was. One of my Dog’s Bar customers?

I dropped a sandwich half in my lap. I went over to the end of the room to get a better look. It couldn’t be. I’ve been told by my friends and family that I amplify my details, but that moment I almost had a seizure of glacial proportions. At the very least, I could feel hot color blitzing my cheeks.

Stuart looked like he was the one seeing a ghost. “Shit, Rachel!”

“My God, Stuart!” I spit a large chunk of tuna onto his shirt. “What the fuck is fucking going on here?”

He stared at me, frightened.

“What the fuck?” My hand quivered. “I saw you dead. They pronounced you dead on arrival—there was blood—you were dead!”

“I thought you’d be cozy in Oz with Colin,” he said shakily. He had a bit of lettuce on his lower lip.

“What is going on?”

“You have a light?”

“WHY AREN’T YOU FUCKING ANSWERING ME?”

“Some things you are better off not knowing about. I don’t think you should go telling anyone you saw me.”

“Like fucking hell.”

One of the two women at the far side of the counter called for her check, and the waiter reluctantly left our part of the counter space. Stuart leaned over; he smelled of pickle and drugs. “Let’s say
I needed to be dead fast. And I reckon Colin and Phillip needed the fame. Simple as that. You got a place for me to stay? I just got here from Buffalo. Fucking oath, I came to this coffee shop because I’d heard you telling Phillip and Colin about it.”

“The guys
needed
to be famous? What does that have to do with this?” My voice had gone from loud to shrill.

“You know, my family is gone, except for me mother’s cousin in Buffalo, New York. I’m the end of the Gibbs line.” I barely listened. I wanted to rip his slimy guts out. “I reckon you want me to lay it all out like on Batman.”

I knew right then. Stuart had run afoul of his shady circle and wanted out. Phillip—thirty-four, an aging hunky rocker with a we’ll-give-you-one-last-shot recording contract. He’d do anything to prove the naysayers wrong about his being too old to put money into the band. Phillip made films for the Victorian Ambulance Corps. He could have faked a death on film with his medical cronies or his old film-school buddy Doug Lang. And his roommate who got married and was always dropping by the house, the video documentarian, worked for the Melbourne police;
he
could have helped carry it off. My mind was racing. Who did they know at the morgue? I couldn’t figure out how Phillip could have gotten Stuart a passport, but I was sure I’d find out soon enough. I had been an utter idiot. And whatever the cockamamie plan had been, it had worked.

“Did Phillip mastermind this or did you?”

“It was Colin’s idea, Chickie.” At first I thought Stuart was laughing at me, but then I realized he was embarrassed for me.

Colin? My Colin? I was shattered.

I opened the floodgates:
Stuart slept in my parents’ bed that night. That lying parasite had forty-five cents in his pocket and planned on sleeping in Central Park. He’d get killed for real, or get arrested for vagrancy. Then perhaps Colin and Phillip would get arrested, when I could have prevented that. Stuart Gibbs, the unexpected salami to end all salamis. I’d sort out my emotions in the morning.

Around one in the morning, I woke up and peeked in the extra bedroom to check on things. Stuart had wrapped a tie around his arm. Dad’s dinosaur tie, a forgotten Father’s Day gift from the American Museum of Natural History.

“Not in my house,” I said, defeated. “This is my house.” Stuart was naked except for his socks. I tried not to look at his penis, flaccid and uncircumcised; it was about the least erotic thing I’d ever seen. He shivered. I was far too late.

“You’ve got to get off the goddamn treadmill,” I said softly. I had never seen the “strap” before. Even though I knew Stuart was at it all along in St. Kilda, I never chose to explore what went on behind his door. Like the majority of Manhattan residents who live below Fourteenth Street, at least those that read the downtown press, I was obliged to be a fan of Lou Reed, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker; I’d read plenty about heroin abuse. But there was the fabled strap, in a dinosaur-tie incarnation, bulging the vein of a foreigner lying on my mother’s Bloomies’ white sale Ivan Stanbury flannel sheets in my family apartment, the last bastion of nothing-ever-happens. I sat there in stunned silence for several minutes. Stuart’s eyes were closed.

“If you had relatives in Buffalo,” I then asked out loud, “why did you come to New York?” I didn’t think he heard me.

“You told me anyone could get lost here,” he said.

Frieda rang my buzzer. “Hi,” I said through the intercom, “I don’t think it’s a good time.”

“Sorry to butt in on you, but do you mind if I crash in your extra bedroom? I left my keys at the office, and the front door there is locked.”

“Frieda, I have a guy here.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. Who is it?”

“Look, I have to go. Call Janet—she left a message that she was staying home to read. Call me if she’s not there.”

“Okay. But first tell me who it is.”

“A friend from Australia—he’s sleeping.”

Stuart’s thin frame was
in a fetal curl on my parents’ comforter. Without Australian sunlight, his angular face, softened only by round eyes, was now the color of uncooked macaroni. Near the bed was our auxiliary bookcase full of secondary books my family didn’t think should be shelved on the living room bookcase with Virginia Woolf and Mark Twain.
The Consumer’s Guide to Electronics. The Inner Game of Tennis
.
The Book of Lists.
Under the computer table were Mom’s detective novels.

“You have so many books,” Stuart said in a dozy narcotic tone. “How can you afford so many books?” He picked up a tattered maroon paperback of
The Catcher in the Rye
. Frank and I’d both done book reports on it. “What’s this one about? Tell me what the story is.”

“C’mon, Stuart, you’re high. You must have read
The Catcher in the Rye
.”

“I don’t know how to read.”

If this particular moment was a cartoon, Danny Death’s words would have been above me in a thought balloon: you need to get some fucking perspective.

Stuart’s eye contact alone terrified. It is scary to be needed by someone you hate. Stuart didn’t have a home left, let alone money.

“How did you know where to go for heroin?”

“I knew the people to look for. I asked them where to go.”

“Great skill you have,” I said under my breath.

“Help me, Rachel? I want to read …” He zoned out again.

Another thought balloon: oh fuck, I could jump to the next goodness plateau. “You ask enough favors for someone who’s legally dead,” I said, holding Stuart’s hand, his blackened, shaking thumbnail pushed into my palm.

It was the morning
after I gave Stuart the Panadeine to calm him down that the ridiculous thought of “killing” Stuart started to gel. (“It came from a part of my brain I had never used before,” Dad said when he’d discovered that he could knit better than Mum.) I had an old mate, Peter, from my graphics course at Swinburne. He could help me do up a fake ID. Peter could do anything. Paste and scissors is an art form lost in the computer era, now that they have those little icons that you click on to move things around. It’s not the same. Peter once redid a comic book for one of our Swinburne classmate’s twenty-first. He photocopied our faces from photos and pasted them onto the superhero backdrop. All of us fuckwits were characters, even the car-park attendant. Fucking brilliant.

I rang Peter, who didn’t want to know what the ID was for. He’d always been that way. He’d make a great spy. He said it was easy as anything to pull together an ID, and I sent him old band slicks of Stuart when he was still our drummer. (Later on, with the massive news attention, I saw Peter at a pub and he winked at me. He’s that kind of mate.)

That same day when everyone was out of the house, I nervously
sat down with Phillip on two crates in his room. He was wearing a brand-new green shirt. Everything in the room was green. His wardrobe, his amplifier cabinet, his Stratocaster. If that wasn’t eccentric enough, Phillip kept his things in green spray-painted milk crates, from books and socks to bars of Toblerone. His bedframe was made out of crates. Staring around, I felt more strongly than ever that we needed a major miracle—like Stuart’s death—to push us out of the almost-but-no-cigar category. A fun nutcake bandleader wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to be.

“You’re out of your bloody mind!” Phillip said, staggered at my plan. This kind of scheme was up his alley, not mine. He kept fiddling with the new edition of
Beat
, flipping the pages and bending the corners up. But when the day was done, he was in it. I appealed to the actor, the lead singer in him.

We got it down. Stuart would die. Phillip wanted Rachel in on it, to juice her brain. But Jesus, I did not want her involved. I had other plans for Rachel. I knew that she liked me; we’d had a horny night in the toilet the previous month. But I wanted to ask her to move out with me into our own place. Maybe the scam would get me the money. I would present my new fame as part of the reason she should go out with me, that she’d mistakenly pigeonholed me as stalled. I wasn’t going to be a plush toy for her to squeeze when she needed companionship. From now on, I was going to take hold of the reins.

Looking back at the moment of birth of this lunatic plan, I can’t chart the bullshit that flowed through my mind. I’d turned thirty-two a month earlier; I was desperate. We got Doug Lang in on it. His career was also going nowhere; he’d been reduced to
helping Phillip film accident prevention clips for the Ambulance Corps. Doug was always harking back to his lost career; he’d done filmwork in the seventies for Countdown and even Paul Hogan’s TV show before “Hogues” hit it big with Crap-odile Dundee.

The Sunday week, Rachel left to go to one of her Dog’s Bar friend’s poetry readings. Stuart was watching his soap. Phillip sat on the couch watching it, too. This was the only time he ever spent in the same room with Stuart, so it didn’t seem abnormal. I made like I was going to compile a mixed tape, piling my CDs in a stack and staring a minute or two at the back of each one. Then Phillip asked Stuart if he wanted to join us for fish and chips down on Acland Street. His shout: he’d found a twenty-dollar bill that morning in the toilet and didn’t know whose it was, Rachel said it wasn’t hers. My arsehole clenched at this transparent maneuver; Phillip wouldn’t be seen with Stuart these days, and twenty dollars in the toilet? Stuart looked a bit suss over the toilet money story, even though he was still strung out. But he knew that we knew he was hungry. He’d eaten the two bagels Rachel had bought the day before, one of his many selfish habits that was sure to get her screaming at him. She was one to talk; her room could have been condemned.