A Firing Offense Read online

  I left him in the basement and returned to the floor to help the woman. The false confidence gained from eyedrops and mints had equalized me, and I was doing quite well with her, explaining the features and benefits of a blender as if they were earth-shattering.

  I was doing well, until I looked over her shoulder. Sporting an utterly absurd smile, McGinnes stood casually behind her, one arm leaning on the display rack, one foot crossed over the other like some cologne cowboy against a split-rail fence. His freckled dick drooped lazily out of his unzipped fly.

  In the course of a few seconds, as she turned around to see what I was smirking at, the zipped-up McGinnes stepped forward to greet her. She walked out ten minutes later, receipt and blender in hand.

  McGinnes followed me to the Sound Explosion and tried to slap me five. I pulled my hand away.

  “There’s no way I’m going back on that floor with you tonight.”

  “Easy, Jim,” he said and pointed to the front door. A skinny man in an L.L. Bean costume and his very plain, pregnant wife entered the store and approached the counter. He said something to Lee, she handed him the ice bucket, he nodded curtly, and he and his wife exited the store.

  Evan Walters ran across Connecticut Avenue to beat the onrushing traffic and left his pregnant wife stranded on the median strip. From the east side of the street he impatiently waved her across.

  “Piss-bucket,” McGinnes mumbled.

  IN THE LAST HOUR of work few customers came in. Those who did left quickly, undoubtedly recognizing the smell of marijuana that McGinnes was now smoking openly on the sales floor. More letters, apologies, denials.

  Just before closing time, McGinnes, who had been ranting about management for the last fifteen minutes (“Fuck Brandon…. Fuck him!”), emerged from the back room with a Crossman pellet gun that would have exactly replicated a Magnum if not for the CO2 thumbscrew beneath the grip.

  “This is for you, Nutty,” he yelled, and began firing into the cardboard caricature of Nathan Plavin that hung suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the store. McGinnes, who had spent a few troublesome years in the army but had escaped combat duty, was a fair shot, and the pellets tore right through Plavin’s ample middle and below to his vitals.

  Lee immediately shut down the showroom lights and locked the front door. I took the gun away from McGinnes and instructed him to wait for me up front. Lee walked by with the paperwork, said she’d be a minute, and disappeared into the back room. I followed her back.

  She was finishing her Colt and stashing it in a plastic trashbag filled with empties when I walked in. I stood and watched her file the papers. She looked at me and at the gun, which I held at my side.

  “What are you going to do with that?” she asked. “BB me to death?”

  “Thought I might bring home a bag of sparrows. For my cat.”

  “Sounds yummy. But why don’t you put that thing away. He keeps it in the radio room, where he keeps his beer.”

  I entered the small room, had trouble finding the light switch, and groped along the wall for the spot of boxes where he usually stashed his paraphernalia. I looked to my left and saw that Lee was behind me, silhouetted against the low-wattage bulb of the office. I clumsily stashed the gun behind the nearest box.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. She was near me, and her hand touched mine.

  “The Corps,” I said.

  “I like that place.”

  “Good.” I moved closer and felt her warm breath near my face. “Thanks for helping tonight. Things got a little out of hand towards the end.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  I cupped the back of her head and kissed her. Her tongue slid over my teeth and along the roof of my mouth. She pulled her mouth away and arched her back. I moved my hand inside the top of her shirt, reached into her loose bra, and lightly skimmed her swollen nipple. She kissed me harder this time and made a guttural sound. I reached down with my right hand and tugged on the back of her upper thigh below her buttocks, pulling her lower body up as she ground it into mine. We broke apart, and she pushed some hair away from her face.

  “Well, then,” she said, and exhaled. “Let’s get going.”

  SEVEN

  THE THREE OF us were in the front seat of my Dodge and heading downtown. McGinnes had slithered into Mr. Liquor and had emerged, mercifully, with only a six of domestic that we were now trying to kill before we reached the club.

  “Drink up,” McGinnes explained, as Lee elbowed my ribs. “The way the prices are in these places now, you’ve got to catch a buzz before you go in.”

  I started to push a tape into the deck, but Tom T. was on HFS and launching into a propulsive set that was kicked off by Camper Van Beethoven’s reggae-fueled “One of These Days.” I let that ride.

  We cut down Cathedral into the park, then took Pennsylvania Avenue across town. As we passed the White House, McGinnes reached across Lee and blasted the horn on the steering wheel, raising his beer to toast the protesters squatting in Lafayette Park.

  In the area of the National Theater I hung a left and drove around the block a couple of times looking for a space. Between the revitalized Willard and the Shops there was plenty of nighttime congestion in this area now. I ignored McGinnes’ repeated shouts, over the wailing sax solo in the Cure’s “A Night Like This,” to park illegally, and eventually found a spot.

  Lee and I crossed the street and looked back to see McGinnes standing in the middle of the road, his head fully tilted back, his small belly protruding, as he shotgunned the remainder of his beer. A carload of kids honked as they drove by, and McGinnes held out his empty so that they could see the label, then met us on the sidewalk.

  There was no midweek line on the polished stone steps of the Corps. A pumped-up guy in a muscle shirt with a blond mass of hair that had been plastered up to resemble a slab of cake opened the door and blocked our way. The thud of heavy bass came out with him.

  “Five dollars,” he said coldly, with a fashionably down-under accent. I had loosened my tie and was wearing black pleated trousers with a blue oxford. Lee, of course, looked fine, but when the doorman got a look at McGinnes, polyestered to the nines and swaying on the steps with unfocused eyes, he seemed to regret asking us in.

  “We’re with the band, mate, ” McGinnes said.

  “There is no band, mate. Five dollars.”

  We paid the cover and entered. I noticed the doorman signal another muscleboy next to the bar, pointing in particular to McGinnes, who was already pushing through the crowd to get to one of the several bars around the dance floor. The DJ was blasting some anonymous House music, and the air was very warm and damp.

  Little had been done to the club since it had been converted from an old bank, a stately blend of marble and brass. As a child, I had come here with my grandfather, stepping on the shiny floor with deliberate force to produce a cavernous echo that would raise the heads of the elderly, wool-suited tellers. Now it was one of those trendy “new wave” clubs that had sprouted up in this part of town, and in Adams Morgan and around Dupont Circle, but was in fact less new wave than seventies disco.

  We had seen this coming in the early eighties, when Devo had a Top Forty novelty hit with “Whip It,” when major labels began scrambling to sign any groups wearing skinny ties and funny haircuts. About this time the Angry Young Men, originals like Costello and Graham Parker, were eclipsed by no-talent fops like Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. We began to realize that those early years, of the punk and new wave emergence, of rediscovering ska and dance music, of separation and alienation from all the youth movements that came before us, were over.

  The result was clubs like the Corps (an utterly false play on the term hardcore), where Reagan youth, wealthy AU and GW students, and gold-chained, coke-carrying sons of diplomats came to party. These “struggling” students got their forty dollar “punk” haircuts, paid the seven dollar cover, drank five dollar, sugar-filled, lime-necked beers, and danced
to the new wave beat.

  I looked at them on the dance floor, enshrouded by the smoke of dry ice, while New Order pumped through the speakers. They were perfectly coiffed, with their predominately black with-a-touch-of-white uniforms, fashionably bored looks on their blankly androgynous faces. I turned to the bar for a beer.

  When I caught her eye, a woman stepped into a light that was spotted up, which accentuated her thick, white makeup and black hair. She had a tight cocaine smile and lifeless eyes. It seemed a struggle for her to unglue her lips.

  “What can I get you?” she asked, wiping in front of me with a bar rag.

  “I’ll take a Bud.”

  She produced one and uncapped it with an opener that was attached to the cooler with fishing line. She reached for a glass but replaced it as I waved it away. I grabbed the beer by the neck, had a long pull, and bent over the bar. She leaned her ear in towards my mouth.

  “Joe Martinson still work here?” I asked.

  “He’s working the upstairs bar,” she said, too loudly.

  “How much for the beer?”

  She held up three fingers. I tossed four on the bar and made my way around the dance floor to the regally wide marble staircase leading to a balcony that surrounded the entire club. Young coeds with loose coat-of-arms sweaters passed me as I walked up, descending the stairs slowly and unemotionally like drugged debutantes.

  I found Martinson behind a barely lit bar in the corner, doing what was probably a placebo shooter with three cute college-age girls. They laid down a ten and walked away. I stepped up to the bar.

  I’d got to know Joe Martinson when he was a bartender at a wild, short-lived, tiny dance bar near Chinatown aptly called the Crawlspace. At the time his trademark was cotton oxford shirts, the sleeves of which he tore off and fashioned as headbands. The bar was always sweatsoaked and to capacity with drunks, and opened at about the time that slam-dancing had a brief run of popularity in D.C. The slamming eventually closed it down, when some Potomac preppies came in for “the experience,” walked out with bloody noses, and sued the owners. But for one hot, lunatic summer, that had been the place to go.

  “Nick,” he said, and shook my hand. He was wearing black pants with a tuxedo shirt and a black bow tie. Though working out had heavied him up in the chest and shoulder department, he looked less tough than in his earlier, wiry incarnation. “What are you doing here?”

  “I should be asking you that, Joe.”

  “A bar is a bar,” he said, “and anyway, that scene is over with. I wouldn’t fit in if it were happening.”

  “Yeah, but this place?”

  “If I remember right, you were some kind of art major in college, Nick. I’ve seen your ads in the Post, and let me tell you, you cut out pictures of television sets very artistically.” We laughed uneasily.

  “How about a shot,” I said, “and pour one for yourself.”

  “Sure, Nick,” he said, and looked at me as if I didn’t need one. I looked over the railing to one of the bars near the dance floor. McGinnes was standing very close to a girl twenty years his junior, talking to her with his mouth very nearly on her ear. Her companion, a pretty young blond boy with a wedge haircut wearing a white mock turtleneck, was standing on the other side of her gripping a beer bottle, angry but timid nonetheless.

  Joe Martinson pushed a shot glass towards me and picked up his own. I looked in my glass and then up at him.

  “Bourbon,” he said.

  “Rail?”

  He frowned an of-course-not and said, “Grand-Dad.”

  We did the shots, and I finished my beer before placing the glass back on the bar. A couple walked by me, whispered to each other, and chuckled. Martinson slid a fresh Bud in front of me and I took it by the neck.

  They were playing some Pet Shop Boys now and the dance floor was packing up. Lee was with a group of friends at one corner of the floor, pointing up at me and smiling. I raised my beer to them, and one of them laughed and said something to Lee, who winked at me, then turned back to her friends.

  I fished the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put the graduation picture on the bar, pushing it towards Joe Martinson.

  “You recognize this guy?” I asked.

  “No,” he said without thought.

  “How about this one?” I placed the doctored, bald-pated photo of Jimmy Broda on the bar. He looked it over and shook his head.

  “I don’t know him. What’s his story?”

  “A runaway I’m trying to locate. I think he’s hanging with skinheads. Thought you might have seen him.”

  “Not in this place. They don’t even let those guys through the door anymore, after they came in one night and pushed some gays around. That was one time I took the side of the bouncers here.”

  “Where would they hang out?”

  “Depending on who’s playing, either the Snake Pit or maybe the Knight’s Work on Eleventh, in Southeast. But they’ve pretty much stopped going to the Knight’s Work—the Marines down there were kicking the living shit out of those guys on a regular basis.”

  “You know any names, people I should be talking to?”

  “Not a one, Nick.”

  I put the photos in my jacket and looked back over the railing at the floor below. I noticed some movement from the right side of the room. A bouncer was pushing through the crowd, heading for the main bar. The DJ had begun spinning the twelve-inch version of Big Audio Dynamite’s “Hollywood Boulevard.”

  I looked to the center of the bar. McGinnes had his hands on the blond boy’s chest, bunching up his turtleneck and breathing right up in the kid’s face. Martinson yelled something to my back as I moved towards the steps.

  The stairs were a blur. I was on the dance floor, the strobe light stylizing the rapidly scattering partners as it synchronized its patterns with the song’s drum machine.

  I was vaguely aware of large bodies converging from the left and right, and as the crowd parted, I saw the redfaced blond boy, unhurt and on his ass. McGinnes had turned back to the bar to resume his drinking.

  A big guy with something like an ax handle in his upraised fist brushed by me and moved for McGinnes’ back. I swept him with my right foot, and he went down to his knees, dropping the weapon as he fell.

  I was grabbed almost immediately from behind in a bear hug. McGinnes had turned and realized what was happening, an apologetic look on his drunken face, accompained by a slightly sad grin that told me what was inevitably going to go down next. Nevertheless, even as he sensed another bouncer approaching him from behind, McGinnes futilely lunged for the steroid boy whose arms were around me.

  McGinnes was dropped with a kidney-shot before he could get near me. The one I had tripped was up and walking towards me, a tight sneer on his chiseled, Aryan face.

  I thought, as he took a wide stance and drew back his fist, how easy it would have been to drop him with a front kick square in the balls. But in those few protracted seconds I had decided that there was no way out of the club that night without being pummeled, that I might as well take it, and that McGinnes and me, we had it coming.

  The lousy prick went for my nose, but I turned my head and went with the punch, catching it high on the cheekbone. The sound of the blow must have sickened the man holding me, and I was released. Then I was pushed from behind with the momentum of a wave, pushed as if my feet were off the floor. McGinnes was being moved similarly, covering his sides and face with his arms from the potshots that the bouncers were taking as they pushed him forward. Many in the crowd were yelling and laughing, the first sign of spontaneous joy on their faces that I had seen all night.

  McGinnes was shoved out the door first. He tripped down the steps and fell to one knee on the sidewalk. I kept my balance as someone gave me a final push, walked down the steps, and helped McGinnes up. He mumbled, “I’m sorry, man,” and I could see that he really was, and that he was in some pain.

  His pants were ripped at the knee, exposing a clean scrape beginning to redden w
ith blood. I said calmly, “Let’s just walk,” and we did, crossing the street like two gentlemen to the occasional jeers of the spilled-out bar crowd behind us.

  Lee was leaning against my car, fist up to her mouth and tears in her eyes as we approached her. “I can drive,” I said, and indeed the events of the last few minutes and the cool night air had made me feel somewhere near sober. We slid into the front seat with Lee in the middle. I turned the ignition key and drove slowly down the block.

  I headed east. McGinnes found a beer under the seat, cracked it, muttered “Jesus Christ,” drank, and passed the can. Lee handed me the can after having some herself. We drove in silence for a few blocks. McGinnes, whose right ear appeared to be larger than his left, chuckled as he turned his head my way.

  “Well,” he said, “we showed ’em.”

  “That we did, Johnny.”

  “Yeah,” Lee said, “you sonofabitches really showed them.”

  She was laughing through her tears and we joined her, a release that had McGinnes alternately coughing, spitting out the window, and laughing some more. He cried, “Irish bar!” as if there were no other choice.

  Lee kissed him on the cheek and then me on my mouth. I continued driving east.

  WE PARKED ON THE corner of North Capitol and F, in front of Kildare’s, McGinnes’ favorite pub. He almost exclusively drank there now, though at one time his bar had been Matt Kane’s on Thirteenth and Mass, until Kane died and McGinnes began complaining about the place being full of “wine drinkers and ghosts.”

  We entered and crossed a crowded room where a tenor was singing, passed the main bar, and arrived in the back room, where a few tables were empty. A waitress directed us to a four-top. We must have looked like accident victims, though no one here seemed to take notice.