Finnegan's Week (26 page)

“You would? Why?”

“I'd just like to. I almost asked the waiter to call my beeper number so I could jump up in the middle of dinner and look important.”

“You
are
important!” she said. “You're a San Diego P.D. detective. That's what I wanna be when I leave the navy. And you're an actor. I think you're real important. People oughtta look up to you.”

A helpless sigh in the face of her unabashed innocence. Fin actually felt himself blush! And he stammered when he said, “I wanna be a screenwriter
and
an actor when I leave the job. I wanna write the first screenplay in the last twenty years not to have ‘Are you all right?' or ‘Are you okay?' in the dialogue.”

“Do they all have that in them?”

“Even the period films.
All
of them. The cliché of our age.”

“Does stuff like that bother you?”

“People in the business oughtta get bothered by bad writing.”

“In what business?”

“
The
business. You know? Show business?”

“I don't know anything about show business,” she said. “You ever met Tom Cruise?”

“The guy twinkles too much. All that dentistry musta cost his old man more than four years at Harvard. You don't go for guys like that, do you?”

“You kidding?”

He tried to think of an actor his own age. Finally, he said, “Do you think Bill Clinton's attractive? Or Al Gore?”

“They're okay for
older
guys.”

That did it. Fin thought he might as well take her home. Served him right, developing a case of vapors over a
child
.

“Getting late,” he said, looking at his watch.

“Okay,” she said, “but it's still early for me.”

“Wanna go somewhere else?”

“My ex-boyfriend used to like to take me to this place in La Jolla where they got some pretty good sounds.”

“Live music?”

“It ain't dead.”

“Hard rock?”

“Semi-hard.”

Was that a double entendre directed at
him?
Was she laughing at this pathetic geezer, as old as Bill Clinton? How did he get
in
this soap opera anyway?

“I don't like La Jolla nightclubs,” he said. “All those rich gentlemen from sand-covered countries get on my nerves.”

“They don't bother me,” she said. “They start slobbering down my neck I just say, ‘Shove off, mate, and
salaam aleikum
.' I was in Saudi Arabia so I know how to handle 'em.”

He decided to stop the charade, to show her who he really was, to see if she bolted.

“Could I take you to an
old
person's bar in south Mission Beach?” he asked. “They have music there too. Dead music of course. Could you stand it with the over-forty crowd?”

She took a good hard look at Fin. The
over
-forty crowd? She'd always been curious, hadn't she? He was more or less as good-looking as her ex-boyfriend, but of course Fin was even older.
Over forty
. Could he be the one to satisfy her curiosity?

“Okay, if I can buy you one a those brandy drinks, I forget what you call em. They're sweet?”

“B and B?”

“Can we still try to solve the case tonight?”

“You got a one-track mind.”

“I buy the drinks, okay?”

“Buy me a drink, sailor? You bet,” Fin said.

“That was a pretty sneaky trick,” Bobbie said, when they were in his Vette heading for south Mission Beach. “Paying the bill when I was in the head.”

“I told you I'd let you buy the after-dinner booze.”

“We make good money in the navy nowadays. I can afford to pay my way.”

“I know you can, but I can't help it. I'm an old-fashioned guy. My sisters made me do it.”

Bobbie leaned back on the headrest, loosened the seat belt and scooted around. The streetlights glistened off her teeth when he turned to look at her. She said, “You really
are
a gentleman, know that? I got a lotta experience with sailors, even a little bit with the officers when they're not scared a getting caught fraternizing with enlisted personnel. Officers're not necessarily gentlemen, I can tell you.”

“I was an enlisted man myself,” he said. “I shoulda stayed in.”

“Don't you like police work?”

“It's a living,” he said, “but the theater's where I belong. I just did an important audition. In fact, the only reason I'm dressed like this is for the role of a dork in wingtips. Next time I get a stage gig I'll send you a ticket and you can come see me.”

“I'd like to go see some plays,” she said. “My boyfriend, before he went back to his wife, he was gonna take me to L.A. to see
Phantom of the Opera
.”

“I'll take you. It's really good.”

“You'll take me? Okay, but I'll pay for the tickets.”

Fin was feeling woozy. The streetlights started swimming. His face felt hot and his pulse was up to a hundred, at least. And it was only
partly
because of the booze. The last time he felt like this he married the babe in the passenger seat!

A moment of panic, then he blurted, “I'm forty-five!”

“Yeah?”

“Does that shock you?”

“Why would it?”

“Take my word for it, Bobbie. Normal people get real goofy when they turn forty-five, but actors? We jump off buildings!”

“I thought you were about forty,” she said. “Forty … forty-five, what's the difference?”

What's the difference? What's the
use
! He felt lonely for a moment, very lonely. He wished someone Nell Salter's age was sitting next to him. What's the
difference?

“No difference,” he said. “It's all the same.”

She put her hand on his arm then, the first time they'd touched. She said, “I don't care if you wore wingtip baby shoes. I just wish you could forget about age. Is this what a mid-life crisis is all about?”

“No, this's what a mid-life
calamity
is all about.”

“Well, just stop it,” she said; then she unhooked her seat belt. “Speaking a forty-five,” she said, “I
gotta
get this sidearm off.”

“We'll lock it in the car.”

“Are
you
packing?”

“Yeah, but I don't think we're gonna need a gun in the joint I'm taking you to. When their customers get in a brawl it's about as dangerous as two clowns smacking each other with pig bladders. I did Shakespeare once, when that's what we did. Hit each other with fake pig bladders.”

Fin took the scenic route, driving past the Santa Fe Depot, a handsome train station in the Mission Revival style. It had been done well, so that the wood framing and stucco created the illusion of eighteenth-century adobe walls. Then Fin drove along the bay front, slowing for the nighttime tourist traffic. There was one cruise ship in port, and the three masts of the
Star of India
were outlined in white lights. Probably the oldest ship still sailing, the
Star
was christened on the Isle of Man in 1863, and had made numerous trips to and from Australia with other iron sailing ships of the era.

By the
Star of India
was a ferryboat that had done rescue work in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Across from the harbor side was the County Administration Center, Fin's favorite building, a 1930's beaux-arts landmark aglow with shafts of vertical light.

Fin was thinking how he was doomed to love everything old about his city and to scorn the new, when Bobbie interrupted his reverie to say, “It's a shame the Portuguese and Italians couldn'ta hung on to their fishing industry the way it
used
to be.”

“I was just thinking how I like all that old stuff!” Fin said. “You read my thoughts.”

“See, we got a
lot
in common,” Bobbie said. “More than you think.”

Fin crossed the San Diego River Floodway, driving past Sea World, and then across the Mission Bay Channel, that allows small pleasure craft to penetrate the 4,800-acre aqua park from the ocean side.

Bobbie said, “I think this is one a the most excellent things about this town. A huge water park right in the middle a the city!”

“Not like where you come from, huh?”

“Wisconsin? Not even!”

“Do you sit around in winter and ice-fish, or what?”

“Yeah, and we stay in saunas mostly, and talk with funny Scandinavian accents and whack each other with birch switches. In our spare time we
shiver
. Believe me, I've heard all the snowbird put-downs.”

“So maybe you should stay in California when you leave the navy,” Fin said, turning onto Mission Boulevard toward south Mission Beach.

The old roller coaster was lit up and operational since the. recent restoration. In Fin's youth, there was a ballroom next to it where his sisters danced to the big bands. He was feeling nostalgic, and would've talked about those golden days in Mission Beach if the woman next to him was Nell Salter, or someone
not
younger than his handcuffs.

When they got to Fin's favorite gin mill they were lucky to grab a parking space only half a block away.

“You aren't expecting a trendy bistro, I hope,” he said, after they'd locked up Bobbie's sidearm.

“I've spent a little time in Mission Beach,” she said, “but mostly on the north side.”

“Nothing up there but kids and derelicts,” Fin said. “Down here any derelicts you meet
won't
be kids, just old geezers that sit around telling knock-knock jokes.”

As soon as Bobbie stepped inside she said to Fin, “Wow! This is a
serious
saloon. Bet you could get a terminal case of Smirnoff flu with this crowd.”

“Or Napa Sonoma virus,” Fin said, “if we stick to wine like we should.”

“Not in here,” she said with a grin. “This is the kinda place where you grog it up!”

It was a typical beach saloon: low ceiling, redwood paneling, and a large four-sided bar in the center where one could look across at alter egos and always find somebody in worse shape than oneself. There were many women drinkers, all of whom were older than Fin. Two of the women had helmet-head blunt-cuts, sprayed so they wouldn't ruffle in gale-force winds or if they got conked by a beer bottle.

Even though California beach communities were into outdoor sports and health, saloons like this one were havens for those few smokers left. These people had worse fears than death:
aging
, for instance.

Fin was in a semi-rollicking mood. He said to Bobbie, “Until I ran into you today, I was feeling that my life had the value of a disposable diaper, a used one. Now I think I'm ready for some fun. So where's my grog?”

Bobbie boldly wiggled through the drinkers standing two deep at the bar, and yelled, “Make a hole, shipmates!” The mustachioed bartender wore a tank top and shorts, and she said to him, “Two double brandies!”

An old coot sitting at the bar turned to her and said, “You old enough to drink brandy?”

Bobbie winked at the bartender, and said, “Make that one brandy and a double Roy Rogers on the rocks!”

This close to the election, there were lots of political debates going on in the saloon. Bobbie stood next to a guy who had navy written all over him. He was arguing with another old geezer whose belly was big enough to make the cover of
Vanity Fair
.

The old sailor said, “A liberal Democrat's always
against
capital punishment, but
for
killing fetuses.”

“So?” the other geezer said, after a horrendous belch.

“It's not consistent. Don't you see that?”

“What's your point?”

“Mother Teresa's consistent. She doesn't wanna execute guilty murderers
or
innocent fetuses.
I'm
consistent. I wanna kill Death Row murderers
and
innocent fetuses as long as they come from the inner city and would probably grow up to be guilty murderers.”

“What's your point?” the other codger repeated, belching again.

“I got more in common with Mother Teresa than
any
candidate does!”

Bobbie paid for the drinks, tipped the harried bartender a buck from her change, and wriggled back through the crowd to Fin, who was trying to play some not-so-oldies on the jukebox, even though it was impossible to hear the music over the din.

Bobbie looked at the dollar bills she'd been given in change and said, “Gnarly!”

Each was nearly faded to white. One was Scotch-taped.

Fin said, “Beach-town bucks. Those dollar bills've been in the pockets of shorts during surfing, swimming, Laundromat cycles, and maybe even bathtubs when their former owners were fully clothed.”

Bobbie kept the limp rags of currency separate from her other money, intending to leave them as tips.

They began watching a woman with dye-damaged hair, who'd probably graduated from high school during Eisenhower's presidency, weaving in little circles with a geezer in flipflops, jeans, and a T-shirt that said “Canardly” on it.

Fin explained that all “Over-The-Line” players knew that it stood for “Canardly get it up.” This as opposed to players in the other divisions like “Cannever,” or “Canalways,” or “Caneasy.”

Bobbie learned that this saloon was an official hangout of the OMBACs, the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club—or if one preferred, the Old Men's Beach Athletic Club—a group that had made the zany sport of OTL world-famous since it began in 1954. Now, thousands attended the annual OTL Tournament on Fiesta Island, and money was raised for worthy causes while men and women tried to bat and catch softballs after having consumed enough Bacardi rum to make Puerto Rico not even
need
statehood.

The annual OTL Tournament attracted packs of aspiring models, actresses, strippers and other exhibitionists, who vied for the honor of winning the tit tournament, thus becoming “Ms. Emerson.”