Then came the lobsters.
Two hundred pounds of chick lobsters destined for the Kona Tiki, Grandpa’s tropical restaurant across the street at the Sheraton Center. They came in late on a Friday near the end of February. Alfred had gone home for Christmas and never come back.
This is what happened: just before Carl left at four, we sent all the lobsters we had to the Kona Tiki for an “all you can eat” special, but they weren’t going to last long. Max made some calls and come quitting time, he called out of his office: “Stick around, Kid. Slavin’s coming.”
“When?” I was already an hour into overtime I knew I’d never get a nickel for.
“When they get here,” Max said.
When the elevator doors opened forty-five minutes later, I saw a strange driver and two heaping crates of lobsters.
“Where’s Ralph?”
“They sent me special,” the guy said. “I should be home already. Suppos’da keep snowing.” He dragged the crates in. I threw about a half dozen little lobsters on the scale and gave the bugs the once over. Not much movement. The select lobsters we served at The Pier were twice the size of these chicks and were always fighting mad when they hit the scale. They flailed, furious, their claws bound with rubber bands. I poked a few of the little guys hoping to wake them. No luck.
“Hey, Max,” I called. “These are no good.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no life to them,” I said.
“Sign for them,” Max said. “They’re going across the street.”
I checked the invoice. It looked like we were paying for select lobsters, two pounds minimum, not chicks.
“But they’re dead, Max! We can’t take ‘em.”
Not good news for the Slavin driver. “You’re shitting me!” he said.
“I can’t take these, man. They’re going back.”
That brought Max out of his office, shoulders first. He scooped a lobster off the scale and turned it over, weighed it in his hand, like its size was the problem.
“We’re taking them,” he said, and snatched the invoice out of my hand. He scrawled his name across it and passed it to the driver, who shot me a satisfied smirk.
Max kicked the full crate on the floor. “Put these in the cooler. Send the rest across the street.”
He skulked back to his office, outraged at being roused from his chair.
I stood at the scale, watching the lobsters shine dully under the lights. Grandpa Joe wouldn’t take this crap, even late on Friday, even for an “all you can eat” special at the Kona Tiki.
Unless this was some sketchy business. Some Dio business.
“Hey, kid. Whadja waiting for?”
“They’re dead,” I said, more to myself than to Max. I picked the half-full crate off the floor.
“What’s the matter with you?” Max said. “I say get ‘em cross the street, I mean get em cross the goddamn street.”
I went to the door to his office, lugging the crate. I don’t know if I was headed toward the back door and across the street to the Kona Tiki or not. I just remember thinking … What was the matter with me? … feeling sad suddenly and confused and pissed off.
I usually didn’t feel anything, and suddenly there it was — heavy as the crate I carried — loneliness.
I felt the weight of it and the dizzy lightness and the balloon-like pressure of it in my chest. Three years of trying to prove something to Grandpa Joe, trying to maybe get something from him that I didn’t have to take when no one was looking — those three years had come to nothing.
He asked me to do one thing — Send the crap back.
And I couldn’t do it. Maybe he didn’t want me to do it.
Was it all a lie?
Before I knew what I was going to do, Max sat back in his chair, took his pipe out of his mouth, and said it again, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Then I knew.
I heaved the crate over my head and yelled, “Fuck you, Max!” as lobsters rained down over the open pages of the Post.
I flung the crate into the corner and rushed out toward the freight elevator. I pounded the button with the palm of my hand. I kept pounding but the doors wouldn’t open. The Slavin driver had the elevator. There, on the floor where he’d dragged it, was the second crate of lobsters. I couldn’t just leave them there, dead or not, so I grabbed the hook and started sliding the crate into the cooler.
Max rushed me, his frog-ugly mug not half a foot from my face. “Now, you’ve done it. You’re in big trouble now.”
“You wanted ‘em. You got ‘em.” I said, regretting I gave a damn about the rotten lobsters I was trying to tug into the cooler.
“You screwed up big time, you punk.”
When he turned toward his office, I dropped the hook and grabbed him by the collar, spun him until I had him by the lapels and shoved him backwards into the dank cooler. He tripped over the crate and went sprawling onto the wood slats, his arms and legs flailing in the air.
I slammed the door. Then I had the padlock in hand. Then it was through the hole. Then it was locked.
Then I was on 52nd, then 7th Avenue, the downtown rush of headlights sparkling with snowflakes. As I fumbled for my gloves, I remembered the feeling of that lock in my hand, the feeling of it sliding closed. I was panting with rage and relief, my breath making clouds, as I passed the subway stairs. I didn’t even think about heading downtown to my room. I weaved my way through the sidewalk crowd to Broadway. Columbus Circle was awhirl with snow and Friday night traffic.
I craved a slice of Vinnie’s Sicilian. Something familiar. Something warm. I headed uptown toward my old neighborhood. I took the park side of Central Park West, to get away from the crowds. I needed breathing room. On the wide sidewalk, stroller tracks and footprints etched the snow and under the snow-dusted trees, ice-glazed pavers gleamed in the shadows.
After three years in the Village, I felt like half a ghost on the Upper West Side. But when I pulled the door open, the smell of sauce and mozzarella wafting out to me and I was home. Once upon a time, I knew Vinnie himself — Vinnie with the big hands and arm hair white with flour. Like Vinny, this guy slid a slice onto the wax paper and nestled the pie and the wax paper on a paper plate and tossed it on the counter. He filled a cup with shaved ice and stuck it under the hissing fountain.
I took my slice and soda to my favorite table by the window and sat there looking out at the people hurrying past. The windows across the street were bright with straggling ropes of forgotten Christmas lights. Vinnie’s clock said eight-thirty. In half an hour, an hour at the most, they’d drop the Racing Form off at the newsstands. I could wait, nurse the soda, savor the pie. The prospect of picking up the Racing Form slowed my racing mind enough to begin figuring the odds.
I figured I’d get away with tossing the lobsters. Okay. I’d probably pay a price for locking Max in the cooler. Fine. Not too high of a price. Max wouldn’t freeze to death or anything. It was colder on the street than it was in the cooler. I didn’t accept the rotten lobsters and I taught Max a lesson. That’s what happened. At worst, Joe’d say, “I get what you did, Michael, but don’t do it again. Tell Max you’re sorry for manhandling him.” Joe won’t say it - but I’ll feel it — the pride. He’ll give me a wink to let me know I did good. He’d touch my arm and say, You did good, Michael.
Like when Johnnie Dio said, I remember you.
By the time I finished my slice and washed it down with soda, I’d convinced myself that Grandpa Joe would call Ira and have a laugh about me heaving a crate of lobsters all over Max’s desk. He’d add the story to his repertoire, make it legend.
And by the time I was rumbling downtown on the IRT local with the Racing Form folded open to the first race, I was sure I’d go to work in the morning and find out Joe fired Max the minute someone set him free from the cooler.
###
The next morning, though, Max’s voice came out of his office before he did.
“Joe’s here.”
Outside, snowplows prowled the streets, their headlights on. What time was it? Seven, seven-fifteen at the latest? Max almost never showed up before nine; Joe never before lunch.
“He’s waiting for you,” Max said, as he brushed past me and went to the unmarked door on the far side of the freight elevator.
My hood still up, my scarf and gloves still on, I couldn’t move. What was Max doing with his hand on that doorknob? Nobody but Joe ever used that door. When Joe called Max for a meeting, Max always took the elevator or the stairs, went through the kitchen, through the dining room, past the bar and the hat check closet, made his way back downstairs past the restrooms and a bank of phone booths to enter through the secretary’s vestibule.
Now he opened Joe’s private door without even knocking.
“I got the kid,” Max said.
I followed him, stepping from the concrete and stainless steel bowels of the restaurant into the carpeted and paneled confines of Joe’s theatrical office.
Joe barked, “Sit down!”
He sat in a tall leather chair. He wore his shirt unbuttoned at the collar. It was copper colored and shiny as a new penny. Joe was smooth shaved down to the tufts of chest hair that grew to his throat. He leaned forward with his arms folded on his desk. His bulldog face looked flushed.
I looked past him at a framed poster for Applause. A sketch of a long-legged woman seemed to bow toward me from the center of a salmon shaded spiral. The walls were bright with cartoonish posters from High Button Shoes and Two for a Seesaw.
“Sit down, I said!”
I didn’t even know I was still standing up.
Grandpa Joe made a huffing sound, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and glared at me. “You got a delivery last night?”
Another huff.
More of that look.
“Lobsters?”
He fingered his glasses again.
“For the Kona Tiki?”
He looked at Max, who nodded. Then he turned his eyes on me again and squinted, like I was a long way away or hidden in fog.
“Max told you to send them over?”
Like Max, I nodded, just once, just barely.
“You refused? You thought you knew better?”
Grandpa Joe bowed his head as though the thought of my refusal was as solid and heavy as stone. Slowly, as though straining against the weight, he raised his head, his eyes wide now with disbelief.
“Then what do you do? You dump my lobsters, my lobsters all over Max’s office? You say Fuck you? To Max? Who are you to say Fuck you? To your boss? And then you…”
He rose up on his arms, his jowls all aquiver. “You grab my manager, my friend, and throw him in the cooler? And lock the door?”
Everything he said sounded like a question, but I had too much sense to say anything. Let him blow his steam, I thought.
My friend? Max wasn’t Joe’s friend. “There’s no friends in show business,” Joe liked to say, “Or any business.” He was putting on a show for Max, all bluster and fury, a storm of outrage to make Max feel better about having to beg somebody to let him out of the walk-in. Grandpa would give me a chance to tell my side of the story. It would be a family matter, and my side of the story would matter. I was rehearsing it in the back of my mind, how he’d said to send the crap back and how the lobsters were rotten and how Max didn’t care as much as I…
“Get outa here!” Joe said.
“What?”
“Go.” Both arms flurried out, like he was clearing the air of a swarm of gnats.
“Why?” I said. I really didn’t know.
“I give him a place.” He looked at Max when he said it.
“But you said…”
“I don’t have to, but I do.” Telling Max a story.
“…don’t take crap.”
“Out of the kindness…” He put his hand near his heart, but he didn’t say the word.
“I just…”
Joe swatted my words away with his bellowing voice. “And this is how he thanks me!”
All the time looking at Max.
Something was going on. I didn’t know what it was, but something was up.
“I…”
“This is what I get?” Joe held his arms out, his eyes wide in dismay. He looked like a bad actor. They were hiding something.
“I did exactly what you said!”
Joe’s hands flew up to block my words. He grimaced and turned toward me. He couldn’t believe I was still sitting there. “Get outa here!”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“You hear me?”
“You said don’t take crap!”
“Go, Go. Just … get … out!
I don’t remember getting out of there. I mean I can’t remember how I got out. I can’t picture the stairs or the elevator. I can’t see a door or the street. I just fled, feeling nothing but urgency and dread and cold. I walked in a daze, retracing my steps toward the subway stairs, my eyes down, like someone who’d lost something on the sidewalk. I didn’t take the stairs. I didn’t want to wait for a train. I kept moving, feeling light, windblown. I headed south, street sign to street sign, saying the numbers out loud to myself, forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven.
I couldn’t feel what I was feeling.
Forty-two, Forty-one.
And then down the stairs. Then the escalator. Down, down, down. The platform gloom, the tunnel wind, the welcome roar of the train: windows, faces, passing, passing, slowing, slowing … stopped. The doors sighed open, sighed closed. I took comfort in the garbled warning, and then the lurch and tug and slowly rising rush of motion. I closed my eyes, grateful for the car’s every click and rattle and screeching turn. I stood up while the windows were still full of mirroring darkness and by the time I planted myself at the door, the creamy tiles of the Canal Street station were sliding by.
I staggered home over the crusty drifts pushed up against the curbs by the plows. I lived in the basement of a five-story tenement walk-up. My piano-tuner friend, Phil, had a workshop on the ground floor and stored his tools and spare parts in the basement. I made my way through a maze of pianos to a rickety stairway. Down I went. My door said Starley in faded gold paint. A wide, built-in workbench, complete with a cast-iron vise, ran the length of the wall and served as my bed. My easy chair and lamp – street corner finds - sat beside the battered piano bench I used as a dining table and desk. No windows: but above the chair, off to the side a few feet, a hole about as big around as a baseball let in fresh air, rain, snow, dust and the sounds of footfall or siren or the occasional human voice.
Last night’s Racing Form lay on the floor near the chair. On the workbench, I found a half-smoked joint, a gallon jug of red wine, my cassette player…my tapes. I began to feel the cold inside me thawing. I fired up the joint before I even got my coat off. I shrugged the old thing off; let it fall to the floor. I whipped off the scarf, tossed it aside, and fell into my chair. I opened the Racing Form and took another hit and blew the smoke toward the hole in the wall. My right hand slid between the cushion and the arm of my chair until it found what it was looking for. My Spaldeen. I gave it a long slow squeeze, like it was a fat envelope for Johnnie Dio.
My first toss skidded across the pale flame-shaped patch on the floor, worn smooth by thousands of throws, short-hopped off the concrete wall, and flew back to my hand like it was on a string. One. The sound, the rhythm, the slap. The smoothness of the ball in my hand. Two. This, and the Racing Form, and The Stones through the headphones: Three. A closed door. My basement. My ball. Four. A harsh hit from the roach, the ritual of my refuge: Five. As long as I kept bouncing the ball from floor to wall to hand: Six. Nothing mattered all that much: not Max, not Joe, not my job. Seven. All I wanted was this place, some peace, and… Eight. What? What did I want? The ball landed smack on the Racing Form, hit my chest. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything. Tears and shaking and sadness so strong I couldn’t do anything but wail until the walls rang like someone was banging on every ancient piano in the world. I roared and wept as though everyone I ever loved or would love had suddenly vanished from the earth.
Spent, slobbering, my head pounding, my eyes stinging, my throat choked with snot, I threw a cushion and blanket on the workbench, and using the vise as a handhold, climbed up and stretched out until my Converse hit the wall. I rolled onto my side, and all my stupid crying done, I curled up, closed my eyes and disappeared.