The Art of Disposal (36 page)

Carlino had worked out a sit-down with Frank Conese, at Calasso's, for me to plead my case on the botched Sesto contract. The plan was in place. Leila was getting twenty-five grand for the simple job of breaking the tabs and putting the powder into the drinks of Dante, Mudcap, and Frank Conese.

“You know this Leila?” Bullfrog said, pouring Porfidio tequila into squat chunky glasses and passing them out to us.

“She's cool,” Carlino said.

“What if she chickens out?”

“If anyone's chickening out, it's you,” Carlino said. He picked up a dime from the glass coffee table, propped it upright between his left-hand thumb and his right-hand index finger, and flicked it so it took off like an engine. It turned into a see-through marble and traveled in a lazy circle until it sputtered and drooped and crashed, and became a flat dime again.

“What if they don't order drinks?” Bullfrog said.

“Frank always gets an espresso,” Carlino said.

“What if he don't this time?”

“He will.”

“But what if he don't?”

“Frank Conese drinks espressos. All day every day.”

“You ever killed a guy—with a knife, I mean?” Bullfrog said, looking at me.

Leila was supposed to tape three chef's knives to the bottom of the back room card table; on the side we'd be on.

“No,” I said.

Bullfrog lifted his glass and tossed the tequila back. “What if they just straight-up kill us, as soon as we walk into that back room?”

“Then our troubles are over,” Carlino said. He tossed back his own tumbler of tequila. His open mouth was a straight line, all teeth, and he let out a long breath.

“This shit better go,” Bullfrog said. “I don't wanna be dead. Or in jail.”

“Hey, that reminds me,” Carlino said. “What's white and goes to prison?”

Bullfrog shrugged.

“A black guy's mail. Boo-yah!”

“Yeah—well what did the barber say to the Italian?”

“What?” Carlino said.

Bullfrog turned his palms up, crinkled his face, frowned like Edward G. Robinson, and went into a bad Vito Corleone impression. “You want I should cut your hair, or just change the oil?”

“Dumb,” Carlino said.

“You're dumb,” Bullfrog said, and reached for the tequila bottle.

He poured us another round. Carlino lit up a smoke. I absentmindedly shuffled a pack of playing cards, tapped them on the coffee table, cut them, and drew cards off the top of the deck. I was seeing if I could sense what card would come up next. Jack of hearts. Ten of clubs. Six of diamonds. Four of spades. I'd imagine it, and then I'd flip the card to see if I might have any special powers I didn't know about. But I was always a few numbers off, and a red or a black away.

One of the only things I have from my biological mother is a notebook. One of those cheap, ruled, marble-patterned jobs you can get for a buck thirty-nine at your local Walgreen's.

She wrote some verse in there. She was no Yeats or Dickinson, but she could string words together. She also did some doodling, mostly the same picture, over and over, of this cartoon dog staring straight at you. Underneath of the first one, it reads:
this is the dog my Daddy tot me to drawl
.

I never said she could spell.

I flip through that notebook every so often, and wonder what life would've been like had she never met those demons that got into her arms and nose; and what if I would have lived with her, instead of with Aunt Stella and Uncle Carl, and she would have given me ice cream money, and jigsaw puzzles, and taken me to Pearson's Field to fly a kite?

But when I start to think like that… that's when I go outside of myself and sort of hover there, and I'm afraid that I might lose hold of the string to pull myself back. It's dangerous, thinking too much about the past—even if it was just a few days ago. And it's dangerous to think too much about the future. There are two thick slabs of inaccurate fantasy on either side of your timeline, and they want nothing more than to pull you right into their tempting gooey centers. You have to be vigilant; you have to stay firmly in this moment—right in this minute you are living now. It's all you've got.

I checked into my room in New York. It was the Hyatt, and it was a major rip-off at three hundred bucks a night. When I got into my room, the first thing I did was strip down and jump into the shower. I take showers the way some people take aspirins: three a day. But when I got out, there weren't any towels. I moaned and groaned, walked around wet and cold, and finally used a t-shirt to sort of pat myself dry. I got dressed, and then I took the elevator down to the lobby and gave hell to the poor guy at the front desk. “Three hundred bucks a night,” I said, “and no towels?”

He credited me fifty bucks for pain and suffering. But that's New York for you. Three hundred bucks a night, and the room was nothing special. The walls were as thin as communion wafers, and I could hear the family next door yapping, and their kids crying, and the view out my window was an actual brick wall. The Big Apple. Rotten to the core.

Bullfrog was in the Hyatt, too; one floor above me. When we first got to New York, he said we should split a big room with two beds. Save some dough. But I like my own space. Frugality should be one of the seven deadly sins, if it isn't in there somewhere already. If you've got the money, spend it. You might be dead tomorrow. I'd brought my entire life savings with me, in a navy blue duffel bag. Three hundred and forty-six thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two dollars.

Carlino was all jacked up when we got to the city. He had a date with a stripper named Amber Alert. She lived out in Flatbush, and he was spending the night with her.

Had it been anyone else, I would've worried about them getting tanked, snorting the night away, and being a worthless sack of potatoes at our meeting the next day. But Carlino had more riding on this thing than anyone else, and he looked like a General gearing up for a critical battle. He hailed a cab, and told us he'd see us mañana.

I did my best to fall asleep. I remembered how Emily went through bouts of insomnia. First, she'd turn around upside down, in an effort to trick herself into believing she was in a new spot. I'd wake up and reach over, and there was a foot where there should have been a head. Then she'd abandon the bed altogether; go downstairs and sack out on the couch. Even then, I'd wake up over and over, hearing her clicking on lights, typing on her keyboard, padding up and down the stairs, flushing the toilets. When your spouse has insomnia, you have insomnia too. Maybe that's why marriage is so hard. Whatever the one suffers from, so does the other. If the one is an alcoholic, you can bet your ass the other one is careful about how much they drink. Except for the loneliness, it's easier to be alone.

Me and Bullfrog had a cheap breakfast at a Denny's and then we knocked around the city for a bit. I went back to the Hyatt and took an afternoon nap, and Bullfrog did the top of the Rockefeller building tour. Around seven at night, Carlino met up with us at a coffee shop in the Village. Bullfrog spent a lot of time out in front of the coffee shop, smoking Newports and watching the passing asses of New York socialites who wouldn't let a guy like him wash their car windows.

A twenty something kid was pulling the espressos and wiping the counters. It must have been his girlfriend sitting at the counter, or a girl that liked him an awful lot, because they were laughing and yakking it up, and the looks between them were sticky.

Carlino swiped his fingers across the front of his phone, and he laughed once in a while.

“This nugget,” he said. “She really loves me.”

“She's texting you?”

“Says she wore me out.”

“How many times?”

Carlino looked up at me. “Just the once.”

“One time wore you out?” I said.

“I'm forty-three.”

“Good point,” I said. “How old is she?”

Carlino shrugged. “Nineteen. Twenty. What am I, a census taker?”

“Amber Alert, huh?”

“Some name.”

“Kind of in bad taste, isn't it? Even for a hooker.”

“She ain't a hooker. She's a stripper. And just to pay for school.”

“Sure,” I said. “Might want to dip your wick in some turpentine. Just to be safe.”

“She's clean,” Carlino said. His eyes got sharp.

“What's her real name?”

“Lauren something.” He smiled. “You should see this broad. I could spend the rest of my life with this one.”

“How much was it? A hundred bucks? Two hundred?”

Carlino let out an audible puff of air through his nose. “She didn't ask for it or anything. It was more like a suggested donation; you know, like at a museum.”

“You go to a lot of museums?”

“Not like this one,” he said and grinned.

The barista called out to us, “we close at nine!”

Now, before I tell you what Carlino said back to him, I should give you the details of what happened when we'd first walked in there.

The kid had been putting some gallons of milk away, and ticking off boxes on a sheet of paper in a clipboard; and right when we walked into the shop, those were the very first words out of his mouth. “We close at nine.”

We've all had a job where you work with the public, and you don't want some loafer showing up right when you're trying to lock up for the night. So Carlino was nice to the kid, even when he said it a second time.

But now, when the kid said it a third time, it really wasn't the charm.

Carlino looked at his watch. “What time is it now?” he said to the kid.

“Eight thirty,” the kid said.

“So tell me at eight fifty-five. Don't be pushy. Your boss don't like it.”

“Who's my boss?” the kid said.

“Me. Or any other paying customer comes through that door.”

“Paul,” the girl said, reaching over and touching the kid's arm, “don't start anything.”

Carlino walked over to the counter. He held up his white and brown espresso cup, and loudly slurped down the last remaining drops.

“We'll get out of your hair now, tough guy,” he said. “You're young. A few more years go by, you'll start to figure out what really matters. Closing up shop at nine on the dot don't matter none. Now, this pretty little lady right here,” Carlino reached over and stroked her bare arm, and she shivered and kept her eyes on Paul, like they were both victims in some terrible kidnapping; “this little lady,
she
matters. Paul is it? Yeah? Well, Paulie, you need to lighten up. If I
did
happen to be here until ten after nine, would it kill you?”

The kid reached for Carlino, but it was a sad effort. Carlino seized the kid's arm, twisted it, and pushed his upper body down slowly until the kid's face was flush with the countertop. The girl gasped. Carlino looked at her and said, “shhhhh.”

I looked up and saw Bullfrog standing there peering in through the window. He looked at me, and I shrugged.

“Here's some friendly advice,” Carlino said. “Don't assume every customer is some asshole who's gonna botch your whole goddamn day or night. Be nice to your customers, Paulie. They're your bread and butter.”

The kid didn't say anything, so Carlino put the twist to his arm some more.

“Okay?” Carlino said again.

“Okay, okay,” the kid said, like he was screaming uncle.

“Good, good. That's good to hear.” Carlino let go of him, raised him upright, and brushed off his shirt a little. Then he looked at the young woman and said, “honey, you can do a whole lot better.”

“Let's get,” I said, putting my coat on.

“Are you guys, like, the mafia or something?” the kid said.

Carlino adjusted his watch and cleared his throat. “There
is
no mafia,” he said. “Ronnie here, he's a freelancer; and me? I'm just a businessman trying to get into an upper management position, if things open up. And they might just open up.”

They both stared at us like we were ghosts in an attic. I wore a serious face as we walked out of the building, and Bullfrog accosted us with a million questions. A few blocks away, and Carlino was cracking up and saying “how about that?” and “that kid nearly shit his pants” and “we just gave them kids the best story of their whole goddamn lives; bet your ass they'll be telling all of their friends at the bar tonight how they met some straight-up, original gangsters.”

“Proper,” Bullfrog said, and the two of them tapped fists. They reminded me of Heckle and Jeckle, those devious crows in the old cartoons.

We walked and told stories about the old days. I told one of my favorites, about the time Tall Terry cleaned eight hundred bucks off Dan the Man and Eddie, playing seven-card stud. He gave it all back to them, wrapped up in brown paper, three months later on Christmas Eve. And in each bundle was a new deck of playing cards. Nice ones. Eddie's cards showed different breeds of dog. Dan the Man's had a wicked skull and bones. Eddie cried. He tried to hide it, but his eyes got wet.

The taxis drove by, and the cars rushed through yellow lights, and a bum dug for change in the return slot of a relic payphone. A stray dog trotted past us, and when Bullfrog called to it, all it did was stop briefly, look back, yawn, lick its nose, and decide that we weren't worth stopping for.

We walked, side by side, Bullfrog tugging at his hat too often; his nervous hands desperate for something to do.

“Frank's old,” Carlino said.

“Experienced,” I said.

“Fuck Frank: it's Mudcap that worries me.”

“And Dante,” I said.

“But the poison—” Bullfrog said.

“If Leila comes through,” Carlino said.

“I gave her the stuff,” Bullfrog said.

“That don't mean she won't blow it somehow.”

“Stay positive,” Bullfrog said. “You got to push that negativity away, son.”

“Joel Osteen over here,” Carlino said.

“Hey now: my Auntie loves that guy,” Bullfrog said.

We stopped in a small park and sat down on a bench. A homeless guy, so dirty and tarred-up he looked like he'd just crawled up from a coal-mine, lumbered over toward us, and started his well-rehearsed pitch about needing some spare change. Carlino raised a hand and said, “stop right there, Sam.”