After Delores Read online

  “But Delores left me,” I said.

  “Yeah, but she’s still got you by the balls.”

  She picked the cheese off her pizza with those cherry red nails, grease dripping all over the floor.

  “You’re old gay, aren’t you, Pris? You believe in honor.”

  “I never let a man touch me,” she said. “And plenty have tried. I take myself very seriously.”

  I went next door to get a beer and picked up one for her too. Priscilla was some kind of angel with an important message. I had a question to ask her. It was “Is love aways worth it?” But by the time I got back, she was gone. Only she’d left her little black purse sitting lonely there like me on a yellow bucket seat. Inside it was her address book and a gun.

  2

  THE BREAKFAST SHIFT started at six forty-five but I punched in at seven on a lucky day. It was still dark outside, no matter what time of year. The crew was always waiting in their early morning attitudes.

  “You look like you’ve been screwing all night,” said Rambo, leaning against the register in his military pants, ready to start all his bullshit for the week.

  “Smile,” said Dino every morning, deep-frying bacon for the fifty BLTs he’d make at lunch.

  “Come pick out my numbers,” said Joe the cook. He was in the kitchen adding sugar to everything because Herbie, the boss, was so cheap he didn’t want Joe putting eggs in the meatloaf or using spices. Finally Joe just gave up on flavor and added sugar instead.

  Herbie’s customers were living proof that you are where you eat. The breakfast club wasn’t too fascinating except for the couple having an affair. They snuck in a few minutes together before work every day, the guy coming in first, staring nervously at his coffee. Then the lady came. Her hair was done up like Loretta Lynn and she always ordered American cheese on a toasted English and a glass of water with a straw. They’d hold hands across the table and say things like, “Did you see Mel Tormé on Night Court last night?” Then she’d get in on his side of the booth and I’d leave them alone until seven-thirty, when she went off to work at the phone company across the street.

  Every day was the same day. It started with breakfast, which is always simple. Most people want “two over easy whiskey down” or else “scrambled two all the way.” You always have to ask them what kind of toast. Then they leave you a quarter because they think breakfast doesn’t merit the same tipping scale as other meals. I’d like to remind them that a token still costs a dollar no matter what time you get on the train.

  Herbie’s mother came in at eleven carrying shopping bags full of discount paper towels, or honey cake left over from her daughter-in-law’s party. Herbie could sell it for a dollar a slice. Joe called her “Greased Lightning” because she moved slowly but still managed to steal waitresses’ tips right off the tables. If you caught her in the act, she might give it back, but Momma was one of those bosses who hated to see the employees eat because she saw her money going into their mouths. She hated to pay them or see them get tips because somehow that money should have been hers. Her son was the same way, cheap. Herbie claimed that spring started March 1st. That’s when he turned off the heat, which drove a lot of customers over to the Texas-style chili parlor next door.

  The lunch rush was a blur where I went so fast I’d forget I was alive and would dream movement instead, swinging my hips back and forth around the tables. This was the most fun because of the challenge and speed and the whole crew teaming up together, feeling closer. So it was always a letdown when the place emptied out at two o’clock, because that was it, money-wise, and the rest of the afternoon was going to be a sit-around bore.

  By three o’clock the workers got to eat, which meant sneaking around whenever Momma or Herbie would turn the other way and popping something in your mouth. Technically we could have egg salad or French fries, but Joe would pretend he was slicing corned beef for a Reuben and leave a whole bunch on the slicer for us to grab. Then Dino would forget to put away the fresh fruit salad so we could all have a nice dessert. Only Rambo wouldn’t play along. He always threatened to turn us in but was too much of a coward. Rambo spent the entire day leaning against the register showing off his tattoos or talking about the latest issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine and how he wished he could have gone over to Lebanon or Grenada instead of being stuck back here in the reserves.

  Work was so much the same every day and business was so slow that I had nothing to do but read newspapers and after that stare out the window. That’s when I would think about sad things. I couldn’t help it. So I started drinking with Joe behind the grill. I guess I just needed to sleep for a couple of weeks but I had to go to work instead, so drinking was some kind of compromise between the two. I knew enough, though, to keep in control of things or else the customers looked at you funny, which makes you feel paranoid and pathetic.

  In the old days, I would come home from the restaurant and Delores would be there.

  “Hi, baby, I missed you so much,” she’d say.

  I’d put my nose into her neck and say, “Mmmm, you smell great.”

  “You don’t,” she’d laugh, that strange Delores way of mocking and loving at the same time. “You smell like eggs and grease.” Then she’d kiss me on the face and slap my ass, being silly and mean and cute.

  Even after I took a shower, I never smelled as good as she did. I had to settle for being a nicer person and what the hell does that mean?

  3

  PRISCILLA HAD THE kind of gun you’d expect from Barbara Stanwyck. It was tiny, with a pearl handle, deadly, sleek, and feminine. I knew that if I hung on to it, I would kill someone. Probably myself.

  Delores used to carry a picture of Barbara Stanwyck in her bankbook. On the back was a copy of her favorite Stanwyck quote: “My three goals are to eat, to survive, and to have a good coat.” But Delores could never remember if it was Barbara the person who said that or whether it was a line from a movie.

  Delores was out for the basics but she also liked being around glitz. She only took the kind of work that let you be near fabulous people. I remember one spring I got a job dressing up as a tomato and handing out flyers for a vegetable stand. Not Delores. She got a job calling up presidents of major corporations and asking them how they felt about their Lear jets. Both gigs paid five an hour, but when I was leafleting downtown Brooklyn, she was phoning from an office on Fifth Avenue.

  “You never know who you might meet in Midtown,” she used to say. “In Brooklyn, you can be pretty sure.”

  Also, she loved People magazine. We used to go out on Sunday evenings to walk around Astor Place, where all kinds of people were on the street selling their stuff. You could buy somebody’s shoes off their feet if you wanted to, that’s how down and out everybody seemed. Some people would have good spreads of old books or coffee pots and radios that had obviously been freshly ripped off. But some people just had an old shirt or a couple of magazines they found in the garbage. That’s where we did our shopping. Delores would buy weeks-old Peoples and some fashion mags for fifty cents, when they cost five times that in the store. Then when we got home, she’d cut out the most outlandish outfits and paste them up on the bathroom wall.

  “Isn’t that fabulous?” she’d say. “Really fabulous.”

  Delores’s new girlfriend was named Miriam Silverblatt but she changed it to Mary Sunshine when she got a job as a staff photographer for Vogue. It looked better in the credits. They met when Delores had a job in the garment district putting electronic price tags on minks.

  It took ten hours to tag six hundred coats and by the end of the day you’d throw those coats around like they were garbage. Sunshine came in to take pictures and caught Delores trying on a full-length in the back. Thinking she was a customer going shopping and not a worker being paid six dollars an hour, Sunshine asked her out for lunch and the rest is herstory. You always fall for someone thinking they’re something they’re not. Sometimes I think that fashion was made for Delores, because it’s so de
pendent on illusion. The people involved tell useless lies professionally and make money, then buy contraptions and use them to have sex. Sunshine had a loft in TriBeCa, invested her money, and developed a good-sized dildo collection. She wore tweed pants and expensive leather jackets. I know this because I have investigated her thoroughly.

  Having Priscilla’s pistol in my pocket opened up a whole new world of possibilities. It might be the opening I needed to get Delores to take my feelings seriously. And if she still wouldn’t pay attention, I could get even more serious. If I wanted to, all I had to do was go down to TriBeCa one morning, early, when the few remaining truckers were loading up. Then, when Delores and Mary Sunshine stepped out of their industrial doorway, I could blow Sunshine’s brains right out of her head. I’d splatter them all over Franklin Street. I’d have to kill myself too, of course, since the world doesn’t understand moments when there are no alternatives but murder. People don’t see your pain when you are the killer. So I’d blow away my insides and Delores would have to live with that for the rest of her life. I could never shoot Delores. I love her.

  There was something so attractive in that picture that I decided it would probably be better to give Priscilla back her gun as soon as possible. I tucked in my shirt and walked over to the address written on the inside cover of her little black book. There was an endless supply of girls inscribed in those pages, each name written in code with one or two asterisks before the exchange, like ratings on a movie marquee. Her apartment building was across the street from The Blue and the Gold, where Delores and I used to play pool every Tuesday night. We’d stroll over there together and put our quarters down. Delores was a mean pool player from lots of years of hanging out with a wide variety of lowlife. I wasn’t bad myself, from a couple of years of hanging out with Delores.

  I don’t own a television or anything like that, so we’d watch TV there, Tuesdays. In the summer, they had air conditioning sometimes too. Delores never knew what to order so she’d usually take a beer until I made her try a White Russian, then she usually took that. But she never understood about picking the right drink for the right weather. I like bourbon in winter, but summer’s right for gin and tonic or white rum and Coke. The rum makes you relax but the Coke makes you wake up, so you get drunk and excited at the same time.

  Delores moved out about a month before the night I got a gun. She had cut out on a Thursday and the next Tuesday I went over to The Blue and the Gold secretly hoping that she would show up too and we could get back together. I was sipping my drink and watching the television when Delores walked in all right, but with Sunshine right behind her. They pranced around like a movie mogul and his aging starlet. I know they did that just to spite me, to make sure I got the message that Delores didn’t care. Sunshine could have taken her anywhere in New York City and charged it on her American Express card. The Blue and the Gold only takes cash.

  After I spotted them, I sat still for a while trying to decide what to do. I could do nothing or I could start screaming in everybody’s face. That’s something I’ve considered seriously ever since I was a kid: jumping up and screaming in the most inappropriate places. But when I opened my mouth, the words came out in a thin, whiny string of spit.

  “Delores!”

  She didn’t say anything but she did look at me.

  “Delores.”

  “This is a public place,” Delores said. “You can’t control who comes in here. You’re a control freak.”

  She was doing that fanatic bit where she opens her eyes real wide and pretends that means she’s right.

  “Look, Delores, if you had busted up somebody’s family, would you impose yourself on their party?”

  “What party?” Delores asked. “Who’s having a party? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She started picking her teeth.

  “Look, Delores, put yourself in my shoes. Don’t you think you would feel bad if you were me?”

  “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t care.”

  So I tried to man-to-man it with Sunshine.

  “Look, Sunshine, you took away my girlfriend five days ago. Can’t you go somewhere else but my bar on my bar night?”

  She didn’t even turn her head to talk. She just let moldy growls drop out of her mouth.

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” she said.

  That’s when I first got the idea to break her face. She broke my home, I had to break her face. She didn’t need my bar the way I did. Sunshine had her own TV and her own video equipment. They could make videos of themselves fucking and watch it together on the VCR.

  So I’d stayed away from that dive almost the whole of the new year until the night a gun brought me back to Priscilla Presley. I checked out the place across the street and when Pris didn’t answer the buzzer, I decided to stop in for a short one. It was worth waiting for Pris to come home so I could get rid of the gun and The Blue and the Gold is as good a place as any to wait. It’s one of those bars where everybody is waiting on the same stools every night on the stumble home from work at five to bed at eleven. Besides, I’d never been there on a Wednesday before and there were whole new worlds of television shows to explore.

  I was on my second one, staring at the still-blinking leftover Christmas lights, when a female voice came to me from the other end of the bar. It started as a tickle in my ear and then, for a second, I thought someone had the sense to record a quiet rap song, but when she got so close I could see her reflection in my ice, I realized that a real person was talking to me. A blonde.

  “Hey,” she said, pulling up a barstool. “You want to buy a phone machine for ten dollars?”

  4

  WE DRANK FOR a while until the girl asked if I wanted to see the machine. I was tired and needed to talk, so I just decided to tell her the truth.

  “I can’t. I have to give Priscilla Presley back her gun.”

  “Do you have to do it right now?”

  “I guess it can wait. I’ll show it to you if you want to see it, but we have to go into the bathroom.”

  “No thanks, I’ve seen guns before. You look kind of sad.”

  “I am sad.”

  Somebody played Patsy Cline on the jukebox and that made me even sadder, but in a pleasurable melancholy way, not a painful Delores-type way.

  “Look,” she said in adolescent earnest as I watched her recite from memory. “You have the possibility to make your life beautiful, but possibility is not forever and it’s not immediate. Know what I mean?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Charlotte. That’s my girlfriend. So, you want to see the machine or not?”

  I paid the check, rang Pris’s buzzer one more time, but still no answer.

  “She’s probably live at Caesar’s Palace,” I muttered.

  “What?” “Never mind. Let’s go see the machine.”

  First, though, the girl had to call her friend who was getting an abortion the next day to see if she needed her to go along or not. It was the last cold night in March and the wind was blowing dark and ugly. She used the payphone on the corner as I huddled in the doorway with a cigarette and tried to push away the tiredness.

  “You got your period,” she shrieked. “That’s great.”

  The girl seemed only five or six years younger than me but she was from a whole different generation. She wore those black tights and black felt miniskirt and oversized shirt that everybody wore. Her hair was cut short on one side and long on the other with blonde added to the tips. My head was still in the sixties. The only thing that happened in the last two decades that made any sense to me at all was Patti Smith. When Patti Smith came along, even I got hip, but then she went away.

  “How did she schedule an abortion without a pregnancy test?” I asked, following her little leather cap and one dangling earring.

  “I don’t know but she got her period. Isn’t that great?”

  She started walking east and then more east until it was too east. There I go again,
I thought, being old-fashioned. The idea that Avenue D is off limits was a thing of the past. Now white people can go anywhere.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Charlotte’s place. I have the key.”

  “How did you know it was okay to come out to me so quickly?” I asked.

  “Easy. Charlotte taught me the trick. She says that if you’re talking to a woman and she looks you in the eye and really sees you and listens to what you say, then you know she’s gay. It works every time.”

  “Charlotte sounds like a pretty unusual person,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the girl answered, not noticing the cold men in thin jackets, staring silently as we passed by. “Only she’s married … to a woman, you know, named Beatriz. I stay at her place sometimes when they’ve got gigs out of town. Charlotte’s an actress. I’m gonna be one too. Beatriz is a director. They’re different.”

  Our conversation was the only sound on the street and her part of it was much too loud.

  “It’s funny having Charlotte’s key. It’s like an older person.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirty-eight. My father’s forty. Why do older people always have keys?”

  “Because older people have apartments. They’re not moving around staying different places. They know where they live.”

  “Let’s get some beer,” she said, heading for the yellow light of a bodega presiding over the steely emptiness of Avenue C. I watched the Spanish men watching her. She was so young. She had no wrinkles on her face and wore a childish blue eyeliner passing for sophistication.

  “Let’s get a quart bottle of Bud and a small bottle of Guinness and mix it. It’s not too bad.”

  I handed her two dollars over the stacks of stale Puerto Rican sweets and shivered. Even the apartment was cold.