Nick's Trip Read online

  Jackie said, “I meant he’s a senior manager. He’s on his way to partner.”

  “I knew that, sweetheart,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek as I squeezed her arm. Mine was now around her shoulder.

  The next time Wattersly turned his head, Jackie ground the stiletto heel of her pump into the toe area of my shoe. The pain ricocheted off my Achilles tendon, sped up my calf, and watered my eyes. By the time Wattersly faced me again I had released Jackie and was wiping my face with a handkerchief.

  “What do you do, Nick?” he said.

  “International finance,” I said.

  “Interesting work. Who are you with?”

  “Fitzgerald and O’Malley,” I said, digging my grave as I pulled two names out of the air and stared at my shoes. “Gold bars, bullion, currency exchange.” I winked. “That sort of thing.”

  I gulped half my drink as Wattersly winked back.

  The evening continued to degenerate along those lines, but happily I was not alone. These accountants and their dates were certainly not averse to having a good time. Someone pulled the plug on the Christmas combo early on, and a boom box was set up, and everything from Motown to Springsteen to Depeche Mode began to turn the place on. There were also several art director types flitting about who, I was later informed, were members of the firm’s in-house advertising department. Their leader was a popinjay who had grown his hair in front of his face precisely so that he could shake it out of that smug face with a casual toss of his head; he was running about the room taking clever Polaroids of the accountants whom he obviously thought he was so far above. After my fourth trip to the bar, I decided that it was a wonderful party and these were all very nice people and I was perhaps the wittiest individual in the room.

  My responses to that ice-breaking question “What do you do?” began to range from the unlikely to the absurd. To Jackie’s boss I was a university professor who was teaching a course this semester entitled Existentialism and Top 40. I explained that the course placed a special emphasis on the works of Neil Diamond (just “Neil!” to his legion of fans) and to his perplexed expression contended that “I Am… I Said” was one of the most deceptively simple yet brilliant songs of the last twenty years. To another executive I made the ridiculous claim to being the sole heir to the WHAM-O fortune. And to shut down a guy who would not stop talking to me about his son’s high school football program, I proudly proclaimed, with a subtle flutter of my eyes, that I was studying to be a male nurse, explaining that I had chosen the profession “for the uniforms.”

  Late in the evening I followed the stunning blonde in the gold lamé dress to an area near the glass wall. One of my new accountant buddies had explained, with a remorseful shrug, that she was “with” one of the senior partners, a fact that may have frightened off most of the martinets in attendance but at this point did not affect me. When she was alone I touched her on the arm and she turned.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hello,” she said evenly, with the weary resistance born in beauties like her. Her push-up bra had set her lightly freckled, perfectly rounded breasts to a point where they touched and hung like trophies on the edge of her low-cut gown. She had a mane of wheat hair and a black mole above her arched lip. In the midsixties I had experienced one of my first erections while admiring such a mole on Anne Francis’s lip during an episode of “Honey West,” though at the time I did not even possess the beneficial knowledge of self-relief.

  “I’m not an accountant,” I said, and hit my bourbon. By now I had forgone the ice, which was taking up far too much room in the glass.

  “Really,” she declared aridly. “What are you, then?”

  “A mole,” I said, still watching her lip. “I mean, as in spy. I was sent by an industrial espionage firm to infiltrate this party.”

  She caught the reptilian gleam of my eye. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, without the barest trace of levity, “unless you are a mole who happens to be very, very wealthy.” Then she walked to the glass and turned her back to me, sipping her drink as she took in the view.

  I was studying the arrogant little ball of her calf and the manner in which her dress was painted onto her luscious championship ass when Jackie walked over and stood by my side. Thankfully she was smiling.

  “What’s slithering around in that mind of yours right now?” she asked.

  “The truth?” I said.

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I was thinking how, right now, I’d like to see her place her palms on that glass and lean over just a bit. How I’d lift up that dress, lift it with my forearms as my hands slid up the back of those tanned thighs. How I’d pull down those sweet panties, put one of my hands on the glass for support, and the other on her fine ass. How I’d enter that moist mound, not too gently mind you, hard enough to see her bite down on her lip and shut her eyes, shut her eyes slowly and peacefully like some Disney deer.” I gulped some bourbon, rocked back on my heels, and exhaled. “So, in answer to your question, I was just thinking what I’d do with that if I had the chance. What were you thinking?”

  “Same thing, brother,” Jackie said with a low, sinister chuckle. “Different method.”

  ON THE WAY HOME Jackie and I stopped at Rio Loco’s, a neighborhood Tex-Mex bar at Sixteenth and U and found a couple of stools in the back near the juke. Lou Reed’s “Vicious” was just ending. Our blue-jeaned waitress set down a juice glass that contained two inches of Grand-Dad, and a mug of coffee for Jackie. We tapped receptacles and sipped our respective poisons.

  “You mad at me?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh. You were a hit tonight. A bunch of my friends asked me about you.”

  “Sorry about the kiss. The weird thing was, when Smiley was coming on to you, I was jealous.”

  “You’re loaded,” she said flatly. “So don’t start analyzing things, not tonight.”

  “Right.” I winked and had another taste. The juke was now playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

  “There must be something missing in your life,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I mean there must be a reason why you drink like you do.”

  “Christ, Jackie, not now. There’s work time and there’s drinking time.” I raised my glass. “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. But I want to talk to you about something, something really important.”

  “Sure,” I said, and put a cigarette in my mouth. Jackie lit a match, and I pulled her hand in until the flame touched the tobacco. I blew the match out with my exhale. “Let’s talk.”

  “Not tonight. It’s too important, like I said. I want your head to be clear when we discuss it.”

  “When, then?”

  “You free for dinner Sunday night?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  I KISSED JACKIE GOOD night and climbed into my icy Dart. It started after a few attempts and I pointed it northwest. There wasn’t much action on the streets except for other drunks and cops too warm in their cars to bother. I parked in front of Lee’s apartment building and listened to “Cemetry Gates” on the radio until it was finished. Then I ran across the hard frozen ground to her stairwell and rang her buzzer.

  After what seemed like a very long while her door opened. She was wearing a brown-and-green flannel shirt and, from what I could tell, little else. She began to shiver as soon as the door was open. I had woken her up and she wasn’t smiling. Her very green eyes had picked up the green off the shirt.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” My tongue was thick and I was leaning on the door frame for support.

  “It’s late, Nick. I’ve got a final tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry, Lee.” I smiled hopelessly and felt my upper lip stick clumsily to my front teeth. “I thought…”

  “I know what you thought,” she said in a low voice that began to build. “There’s lipstick on your cheek, hard liquor on your breath, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and you’ve got a
hard-on. You thought you’d slide on in here and relieve yourself, that’s what you thought. Well, think about this. You mean something to me, Nick, in a strange way, but the next time you disrespect me like this, it’s going to be the last time. Understand?”

  Before I could tell her that I certainly did, the door was closing with a thudding finality. I stared at it for a minute and then walked back to my car. I drove around the corner to May’s on Wisconsin where my bookie friend Steve Maroulis let me in the bar entrance. We had a nightcap together under the cruel lights of last call. I asked him a couple of questions about local gambling and wrote down the answers so I wouldn’t have to ask him again. I think I downed another drink while he closed up and did the paperwork. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I awoke fully clothed on a made bed, that I realized I had driven myself home.

  FIVE

  THERE WAS A story that used to be told around town concerning my grandfather and Lou DiGeordano that almost attained the status of local folklore, until the men telling it began to die off and it began to die off with them.

  My grandfather, Nicholas (“Big Nick”) Stefanos, came to this country from a village in Sparta just after World War I, leaving behind his wife and young son. Like almost three quarters of Sparta’s male population in those years, he came to America to make a quick fortune and to escape the horrible rural poverty that resulted from the new government’s disorder and indifference after the Greek War of Independence. He had every good intention of returning to Sparta, but as it happened his wife died from tuberculosis and his son was raised by relatives in the village. His son eventually married another young woman in the village and out of that union I was born. My parents sent me to the States at a very early age with the intention of joining me in a year or two, but again, as things happen, they never made it. Consequently I was raised by my grandfather in D.C. Having never known my parents, I can almost truly say that I’ve never missed them, though I’m sure some eager psychiatrist could bleed me dry with a lifetime of sessions and related explanations as to why I’ve become this person that I have.

  Big Nick spent Prohibition living with relatives and driving a bootlegger’s truck in upstate New York. I imagine he was also some sort of a strong-arm man, as he had the bulk, and I’ve heard several old-timers claim that he was quick with his clubbish hands. He himself told me, without remorse and in fact with a bit of light in his eyes, that he had done some “bad things” in those years to get by. I know he packed a pistol; an Italian .22 had blown up in his face around that time and given him a lifelong scar on his cheek, which explained his fondness for American firearms, witnessed by the fact that he carried a pearl-handled .38 Smith & Wesson in his jacket pocket until he died. There is a photograph of him in my possession that says more about those years than he ever could. He is in a dark, wide-lapelled pinstriped suit, and he’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The hat is pulled down over one eye. There is a young blonde wearing a floral-print dress in the edge of the photograph, obviously an American woman, and she is looking up at him and laughing. It’s easy to guess from his cocksure grin why that young man never returned to the village.

  But something, some trouble maybe, made Big Nick decide to drift south and end up, with relatives again, in Southeast Washington in the thirties. He had brought some cash with him, and the cash staked him in a vegetable stand in the old Southeast Market. His life here was more austere, though reportedly he was a heavy drinker and enjoyed fairly high-stakes poker and occasionally games involving dice. One night, according to the story, he had a dream of his mother, alarming in itself, since Greeks in general did not believe it was likely to dream about the dead. In the dream she was behind the door of an apartment, and what he talked about with her is relatively unimportant. What he remembered when he woke up is that the number on the apartment door was 807.

  The next day Big Nick put twenty bucks on 807 with a young numbers runner by the name of Louis DiGeordano. Little is known of DiGeordano’s history before that day except that he was a Sicilian immigrant of my grandfather’s generation who up to that point had not experienced the luck of Big Nick. He pushed a fruit-and-candy cart in the streets and lived near Chinatown in a two-room apartment with ten other relatives.

  When the number hit, DiGeordano delivered the payoff to my grandfather. The hit was in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars, a fortune in those days. The legend has it that when DiGeordano gave Big Nick the bankroll, my grandfather peeled off two thousand dollars and handed it to Lou. DiGeordano supposedly dropped to his knees (an embellishment, I think, that has been tacked on to the story over time), but my grandfather pulled him back up. It was a curious act of generosity that my grandfather never explained or claimed to regret.

  Life after that took unexpected turns for both of them. My grandfather invested in a couple of downtown buildings and owned and operated a series of modest coffee shops until his death. He never flashed his money around, decreased his card playing over the years, and even quit drinking when I entered the picture. Lou DiGeordano opened his own carryout with the two thousand and began a loan-sharking business and an organized gambling operation that grew into a small, bloodless crime empire in D.C. that lasted well into the sixties. Lou was still alive, but his business had deteriorated and had been run into the ground, as businesses usually are, by his son, a man named Joey.

  NOW, ON THIS BRIGHT, biting Saturday in December, I was driving my Dodge Dart south on Georgia Avenue with the window down, letting in as much cold air as I could stand in a vain attempt to slap away my hangover, and I was on my way to see the DiGeordanos. The cigarette I was smoking tasted like the poison it was, and I pitched it out the window. I tried a breath mint, but that was worse, and it followed the path of the cigarette.

  I pulled over and parked on Georgia just past Missouri, in front of an R & B nightclub and across the street from a Chevy dealership and a Chinese restaurant facaded as a pagoda. Next to the nightclub was a pawnshop and next to that was Geordano’s Market and Deli. The sign on the window was small, but there was a larger fluorescent sign below it advertising cold beer and wine to go. I walked around a man with mad black eyes who looked seventy but could have been forty. He was wearing a brown wool overcoat that was ripped open beneath both arms. The coat smelled, even with the wind behind us, of body odor and urine. The man said something unintelligible as I passed and entered Geordano’s.

  A small bell sounded as the door closed behind me. The air was heavy with the tang of garlic and spice. I went by tall shelves stacked with small red-and-blue cans and large gold cans of olive oil. Past the shelves were two coolers stocked with beer, fortified wine and sweet sodas, and past that a row of barrels with clear hinged lids containing various types of olives and spiced peppers. The barrels were lined across a Formica counter on which sat an old register. Beyond the counter was a work area and the entrance to a back room of sorts. In front of the entrance was a chair and next to that a steel prep table on wheels. Dried beans were scattered on the top of the table, and next to the table sat a burlap sack half filled with the beans. An old man was sitting in the chair, and he was looking closely at the beans on the prep table before he pushed small groups of them into his hand and dumped them into another burlap sack. He looked up at me as I approached the counter. Thin pink lips smiled beneath a broad gray mustache.

  “Nicky,” he said.

  “Mr. DiGeordano.”

  I walked around the counter before he could stand and shook his hand. His grip was still strong, but the flesh was cool, and the bones below it felt hollow. His aging was not a shock—he was in his mideighties, after all, and I had seen him at my grandfather’s funeral—but the frailty that went with it always was. He was wearing a brown flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and over that a full white apron. The apron had yellowed in spots, and there were reddish brown smudges of blood near the hemline where he had wiped his hands. He wore black twill slacks and black oilskin work shoes with white socks, an arrangement fashiona
ble with kids sixty-five years his junior in some of the clubs downtown.

  “I wasn’t sure if this was your place,” I said. “The name I mean. When did you drop the Di?”

  “A couple of years ago,” he said in the high rasp common in Mediterranean males his age. “Only on the sign out front. No use making it tougher on our customers to remember our name than it already is. We still get some of the old-timers, but mainly what we get is neighborhood people. Beer and cheap wine is our main seller. You can imagine.”

  I nodded and then we stared at each other without speaking. His eyes were brown and wet like riverbed stones. His hair was whiter than his mustache, full and combed high and then swept back. Deep ridges ran from the corners of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. The mouth was moving a bit, though he still wasn’t talking.

  “What are you doing?” I said, glancing at the table.

  “Checking the beans for rocks,” he said. “There’s always a rock or two in the bag. You have to go through them by hand. A customer breaks his tooth on a rock, you got a lawsuit, you lose your business.” He shrugged.

  “Is Joey in? I’d like to talk to him if he has a minute.”

  “Anything I can help you with?”

  “Nothing that serious,” I said.

  “In the office,” he said, and made a small backward wave with the point of his index finger. Then he yelled for his son.

  Joey DiGeordano stepped out momentarily. He was rubbing his hands with a towel, and he looked at me briefly before he looked over to his father. Joey wore a dark suit and a blue textured dress shirt more poly than cotton, with a plain lavender tie that was tacked to the shirt by a pearl button. He was street slender, and his hairline was identical to his father’s, and it was pompadoured identically but was black and slicked with some sort of oil-based gel. The smell of a barbershop entered the room with him.