You Can Say You Knew Me When (41 page)

I’m running south, or east, I can’t tell; I’m all turned around. How long do I have to run before I’m sure they’re not after me? Why am I running? Why did Dean flee? What I said: Angelo is dead. And Teddy is dead. I’m the Angel of Death. I might as well be dead myself.

I blast out of this maze onto Santa Monica Boulevard, panting, heaving,
these fucking smoker’s lungs
. I’m at the same corner where I was confronted by the guy from the bookstore. I hear a siren. Did they call the police? I am an easy target, a pale redhead drenched in criminal sweat. I have a baggie of pot in my pack. I should call Colleen. Are there still pay phones in LA? Over my shoulder, a blur of blue in the distance: a big man. My predator, still searching?
All this for a bar tab I could have paid.

The light is red, but I dash onto Santa Monica, leaping without looking. I pause to let a car whiz by, but there’s another and another coming right at me. One swerves, passing so close I feel the vibration through my backpack, and I stumble and I can’t recover. My balance is sucked away like the trick floor of a carnival ride. Eight lanes to this street, and I’m now stumbling across three of them, falling onto my hand, my shoulder, my hip.
Ow, fuck, ow!
I’m down.

Oncoming headlights, diamonds of light in the bright sky—they keep their lights on during the day in LA? You should get up, you should get away, but for what? Your quest is over. Fifty dollars in your pocket, marijuana in your bag, Teddy’s letter in your bag, Danny’s voice in your head.
You got balls
. Yes, you do. The balls to stay down on the pavement as this car drives straight toward you. Who cares if you get up? If you get up, you’re still running. Diamond light coming. Tires screaming. Car horn angry. Danny angry. Teddy angry.

Burning ground holds you down; you let it
.

Close your eyes don’t watch it happen.

Bile in your throat
extra Tabasco
.

Jesus Christ Rusty fuckin’ Garner.

Stick it where the sun don’t shine.

An outcry of brakes, scorched rubber on blacktop, a gust of heat like a knife to the throat, like strangulation. You’re floating through the charred air. Are you free now?

A voice emerges, then another. The angry voices of men, voices that have always been there. Anger is the fear of men unleashed.

I opened my eyes. A car was pivoted not two feet to my right. The one that almost hit me. A woman was stepping from it, heels on pavement.

Onlookers looking, mouths open. But no cops, no security guard, no waiter.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” I waved a hand to anyone who cared before noticing the abrasion, seeping blood down my wrist. On the ground my stuff was scattered: my bag with the zipper gaping; my recorder, batteries ejected; Ginsberg’s journals, splayed. An extra T-shirt—I would need that now; there was blood on my sleeve. Teddy’s letter did a flip-flop on the asphalt.

“You could have been run over. I came so close.” The woman from the pivoted car stood in front of me: stylish in a blinding white dress, ageless with a halo of blonde hair. A smooth face and concern in her eyes. She’d collected the remainder of my spilled belongings: cigarettes, lighter, pot. “Put this away,” she advised.

It seemed that I knew her. “Do I know you?”

From behind us, the guy in the other car: “Get out of the road, fucking asshole!”

The woman shouted back: “A little compassion here!” Then softer, to me: “Which way are you going?”

I looked around. There was an answer to this question.

She guided me to the curb. “I think you’re in shock, honey.”

I did know her: a soap-opera actress,
Days of Our Lives.
Summers during high school, I watched the show with my mother, religiously. The character had two names—no, they were twin sisters. The evil one plotted against the good one, but the good one killed her instead, though not before she’d lost her mind, was dumped by her husband, had her fortune swindled.

“Do you need a lift to your car?” she asked.

I sent her away with muttered thanks. She’d abandoned her chariot in the middle of the road, hazards flashing. Other drivers were laying on their horns. I watched her soar on slender heels, hair radiant in the light, a white dress gleaming. My Hollywood vision.

I heard a siren. Maybe not for me, but still. Up ahead I saw a movie theater, ten titles stacked on the marquee. I jogged toward it, pausing at a mirror in an antique-store window. My shirt was untucked, soaked in sweat and torn where the arm was bloody; the stain on my khakis had set; my shoulders trembled. My face was distorted, eyes wild, skin hot pink under damp copper hair. A sputtering flame fighting for air.

I bought a ticket to the biggest blockbuster advertised, a John Travolta action movie. I thought, I can hide in a crowd. In the bathroom, I washed up, packed paper towels on the gash, changed my shirt. A guy came in talking on his phone and steered around me and my mess. He continued his conversation from the crapper.

At the snack bar, I spent four dollars on a small popcorn, suddenly ravenous. The theater held ten empty seats for every one patron. I slunk low, still expecting arrest. The cool, carpeted darkness promised the relief of a hermitage, but the film was violent and militaristic and false, full of shooting without wounding, killing without dying. People die every day, but Hollywood doesn’t know how to show it. Travolta was uttering his every line with smugness, like a man who’d never actually feared for his life, who’d remained above it, protected by money and fame. He’d once been twenty and beautiful; I had tacked his poster inside my bedroom closet. Recently I’d seen him promoting this movie in a magazine, posing with his perfectly constructed family, talking about what he called religion.

I couldn’t stay here, but I was afraid of the street. I could still feel the heat of the road beneath me. Why hadn’t I gotten up? I’d waited in my fallen position. The actress’s swerve made the difference. The good twin to the rescue. I had been saved.

I had not saved myself.

The streets were a maze, but there was no other way. I had to return to the world.

What had that white-haired man in Grace Cathedral told me?

You just have to walk back out.

C
olleen yelled at me on the phone, then yelled at me in person, outside the movie theater, where she picked me up. She’d been driving around for half an hour. Our original plan had been to meet at the front desk, where we’d stored our bags, after I was through with Dean. When Colleen returned, she was met by the head of hotel security, who, collaborating with the waiter and the front-desk clerk, had deduced that the guy who cut out on his bar tab was the person who had stayed in her room. “They wanted your name,” she told me. “They wanted to bring in the police.” She lied and charmed her way through the interrogation, telling them that she didn’t know me, that I was a guy she’d picked up in a bar, that we hadn’t exchanged personal information.

“Thanks for not giving them my name.”

“Thanks for the fucking humiliation, Jamie. Four guys ganging up on me in this tiny office.”

“Those fuckers,” I said.

“What about you,
fucker
? You left me to the wolves.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I had to go after Danny Ficchino.”

“You could have paid the damn bill.”

“I was so confused,” I muttered. “I wanted to die.”

“You don’t get to die, asshole. You get to sit here and listen to me tell you to get your shit together.” And she told me, again and again. She was mythic, volcanic.

When she finally fell silent, I asked, “Did you tip the waiter?”

She reached over and slugged me in the arm, her fist hard as steel.

“Sorry!” I cried, flinching. “Really, truly, truly fucking sorry.”

I tried to explain myself—not myself so much as my awful meeting with Dean Foster, his transparent bombast, the way he freaked out when I mentioned his brother, Angelo’s death.

“Angelo, your uncle?” she asked. “Tommy’s father? This guy Dean Foster is Tommy’s uncle, too?” Some computation passed across her face, shaking off the fury she’d been draped in since she picked me up.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I got a room for tonight. A different place. I’m not sure I even want you there.”

“We’re not going back to San Francisco?”

“Not today.”

I saw that unreadable look in her eyes again. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Is this about work?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing.”

Another night in LA, another chance.
Just walk back out.
“I should try to talk to him again.”

“To Danny Ficchino? He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Probably not, but I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve got to make this right.” I squinted at Colleen and said, “Maybe I can borrow your car?”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“I’ve got balls.”

“I’d like to cut them off.”

The hotel was downscale from the last one; a motel, really, left over from the 1950s but not revised for the kitsch entertainment of the new moneyed class. The bathroom showed signs of wear—seams of mold in the tub corners, a drizzle of rust under a window frame—though it smelled piney clean. I took a necessary shower, standing in the cleansing flow for a long time, conversing with Dean Foster. Various scenarios played out: the one in which I show up at his place and he doesn’t open the door; the one in which he opens the door and his ferocious dog attacks me; the one in which he invites me in and I fuck it up again. The one in which he apologizes, telling me he forgot to take his medication that morning, and we share an all-forgiving laugh.

I stood at the sink, shaving my face with a disposable razor from Colleen. There was a knock on the bathroom door. Before I answered, in walked Tommy Ficchino.

Startled, I let the edge of the blade nick my skin. I wrapped a towel around my waist. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I been waiting for you to finish up, but I really hadda piss.” He stepped past me, planted himself in front of the toilet, unzipped. “Keep your eyes over there.”

“Why, if I look you’ll turn gay?” I dabbed toilet paper on the cut.

“I just don’t want to make you jealous.”

I heard the force of his stream begin churning the water. I looked. Through the folds of his pleated pants, a few thick inches dangled out, the glory previously hinted at by Colleen. “So I’m assuming Colleen called you?”

“Actually I called her.”

“Why are you calling Colleen in LA?”

“Why do you think?” He zipped up and flushed.

“You’re playing with fire, Tommy. Since you last saw me I managed to destroy things with Woody.”

“Yeah, I hear you’ve been a real big problem for everyone.” He crossed his arms, parted his legs. His jokiness, never far from the surface, was notably absent.

“You’ve got nerve coming in here with your big swinging dick to lecture me.”

“What are you fucking talking about? I’m your fucking pal! We’re family.”

“Except you don’t know anything about my life.”

“You think I woulda messed around with Colleen if I didn’t trust you?” He uncrossed his arms, threw them wide. “So show me a little in return, okay?”

I pushed out of the bathroom. Colleen was sitting on the bed, listening, waiting. “He was in town on business,” she said.

My back to both of them, I dropped my towel.
Kiss this white ass.
I pulled on underwear, jeans, the last clean T-shirt I’d brought. I could feel the air touch the slit of blood expanding on my chin, so I blazed past them, back to the sink.

Tommy called after me, “Why didn’t you tell me you were gonna see my uncle?”

I watched a dot of crimson bloom on the tissue. Danny was linked to Tommy and Tommy to me, me to my father to Katie to Angelo and back to Danny. A chain of blood, each link weak. “I didn’t know you’d care.”

“So what happened? Who is he? What’s he like?”

I looked away from the mirror. Tommy and Colleen stood side by side, framed in the doorway. He had a hand on her shoulder, but they looked not so much like lovers as long-time friends, already to a stage where working as a team came naturally. The space between them, filled with early evening light, orange and blue, glowed like a lattice.

“I can take you to meet him,” I said.

Anxiety always works like this: You imagine every scenario but the one that comes to pass. Yes, the bungalow was unlit as Tommy and I crossed the empty street, passed the
BEWARE OF DOG
sign and the jungly growth, and made our way up toward the front door. Yes, the dog roared as if from an engine in its bowels, the sound of bared fangs, wild canine eyes, claws scratching the wall waist-high. Yes, we had to ring and then knock and ring again before the door sighed open the width of the chain that secured it. Yes, when Dean faced us—his breath fumey with booze, the Doberman behind him growling—he was unwelcoming, as expected.

But when I said, “I’ve brought my cousin, Angelo’s son,” Dean’s eyes, framed this time by clear reading glasses, went wide. He commanded the dog to shut up.

We waited as he scrutinized Tommy. “Which one are you?”

“Tommy. I’m the youngest,” he said, reaching out for a shake. The dog let loose a bark so loud I scurried back a step, but Tommy held fast, his hand suspended between the hard surfaces of door edge and jamb.

“You’ve got no business here,” Dean said, but his voice wavered.

Tommy said, “I’ve come to pay my respects.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dean muttered. I watched him mull this over. For a moment it could have gone either way. Then he said, “I better put Victor in his room before he eats your kneecaps.”

We walked into a space identifiable as a living room only by the TV set and two armchairs on either side of a coffee table, upon which sat a half-empty vodka bottle. The rest of the room was a homespun workplace, cluttered with the fits and starts of whatever vast, disarrayed project Dean occupied himself with.

My eye went directly to a reel-to-reel tape machine the size of a car windshield, set up in the far corner. A soprano’s aria filled the air, though it came from some other source, because the tape was frozen on its spools. A microphone on a stand had been patched into the console. The room’s longest wall was lined with file boxes, crooked as old brick face, each marked with a month and year going back to the 1980s. Down a darkened hallway I spied more boxes, the big kind for files and the thin ones for tape reels. Two long folding tables on metal legs blocked a sealed-up fireplace; each table was piled high with three-ring binders that sandwiched the lettucey edges of newspaper clippings. He must have subscribed to twenty or thirty publications; magazines were scattered everywhere. The room smelled like old paper, dog food and dust.

“Are these the movies you did?” Tommy asked. I had filled him in on Dean’s career, and Tommy stood now facing a row of framed movie posters with titles in English and Italian. There were other framed images, too: signed photos of Lana Turner, Natalie Wood, and Ingrid Bergman, who’d penned, “To Dean, un ragazzo bello! Good luck.”

“I was big in Italy. I had a part in a Rossellini film.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“My scene got cut. I coulda been big as Warren Beatty in this country, and I woulda been, too.” He left the room and returned carrying a plastic jug of concentrated orange juice, which he set down beside the vodka. “I don’t know how strong you take them,” he mumbled. He folded into an armchair and motioned Tommy to the other.

I fixed myself a screwdriver, then approached the reel-to-reel. “You’ve got quite a setup here.”

Dean said he’d done some voice-over work in the seventies and later bought the machine from a recording studio. “Hit
PLAY
and
RECORD
,” he commanded, and I did, sending the slender magnetic tape snaking through the gears. “Turn the mic around, facing us. You know how to work the levels, Radio Guy?” he asked. I said I did. He intoned a sound check: “Dean Foster, eleventh of April, the year 2000. I’m here today with some unplanned visitors—.” He interrupted himself to order, “Turn it up. Up! Strong!”

“You’re pushing into the red.”

“That’s right, I want to see a little red!”

I upped the needle into the squawk zone, dangerously tempting distortion. But, hey, it was his machine. He’d obviously run it a million times.

“You want me to leave it on?” I asked, unsure if this was just a demonstration.

“That’s right. It’s for the memoirs.”

“You got a contract?” I joked.

He grumbled and flapped his hand at me, dismissing the technician from the set. His pinky ring glinted—a different ring, with an amber stone. Once again the stone perfectly matched the frames of his eyeglasses and corresponded as well with the orange sweater he wore.

Tommy cleared his throat. I didn’t know if he was improvising or had scripted this on the way over, but he launched into a speech, his elbows on his knees, his hands conducting the air in front of him. Tommy the salesman, pitching a product: the family. He said he’d always wondered about his uncle Danny, always wanted to meet him; he was surprised that I had tracked him down; he was
truly honored
to be here. “I feel it’s never too late to start a relationship,” he said.

Dean’s eyes drifted across Tommy like a spotlight scurrying to catch an actor, overshooting the mark, inching back. He landed on the expensive gold watch that flattened the hair on Tommy’s thick wrist. “Is that a Rolex?” He waved his glass toward Tommy, who straightened up to avoid a splash. “You get an inheritance from your father?”

“Nothing much. My brothers got the business, and my mother—.”

“They made sure I never got a dime!” Dean shouted. I watched the needle spike; from a dark chamber of the house Victor howled. I knew that the Ficchinos had started out immigrant-poor; I assumed whatever money Nonno Ficchino left behind went to his widow, who remained in their cramped Hell’s Kitchen apartment until the day she died. But Dean was now recounting the
fourteen-carat jewelry, the Cadillac they sold that was supposed to be mine,
various
treasury bonds
in specific dollar amounts, as detailed as a list of this morning’s groceries. “I had some legal trouble. I told them I needed some money. It was entrapment; it wasn’t even my fault. But they used it against me—Angelo, Katie, and Rusty with his big mouth, who couldn’t keep a secret if you paid him.”

I’d been biting my tongue, but the mention of my father made me bold. “Aunt Katie’s still talking about how you didn’t go to her wedding,” I prodded.

“I can’t answer for my parents,” Tommy jumped in. “But for myself and, you know, the younger generation, we like to think the past is the past, and let’s move on.”

Danny wasn’t moving on. The past was the present; the curtains had parted and the ghosts were on stage. “How’s I supposed to go to their wedding with this one there?”

“You mean my father,” I corrected.

“Like father, like son,” he said. Slurred, really:
like shun.
His anger had lit the fire of his intoxication.

“I’m not like him,” I protested.

Tommy spoke up again. “Jamie had a rough time with his dad. Uncle Teddy didn’t understand him.”

“You got Rusty’s same hair,” Dean said, “and that mean face of his.” From his chair he aimed a stare at me so intense, so hostile and belligerent, it could have sent a wild animal to flight. And it had, hadn’t it? Sent me running into the street that morning. I hated him right then—but only as far as I’d failed to make him understand.

He was pouring himself another drink. I stepped to his side with my empty glass and leaned forward. Our faces hovered close, close as they’d been since the restaurant. In a directed, hushed voice, I said, “You’re not the only cocksucker in the room, you know.”

He lurched, slivers of ice tinkling in his glass. I waited for whatever condemnation would follow, but Dean remained speechless, mouth agape.

Tommy shifted in his seat, looking helpless. He’d bought a ticket to the wrong show; the ghosts were invisible to him. I had told him earlier that I thought Dean was gay, and surely the signs were evident—the pinky rings, the framed divas, the opera music soaring to the heights—but I hadn’t given Tommy many details.