Closing Time, page 4
He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream.
He picked up the pots of coffee and walked back to station two. The faggot was still bending over dabbing at his pants leg but he got the other one, the one without the glasses as he swung the decaf in a wide arc yelling refill, folks? in his best and loudest stage voice, splashed the other faggot in the face so that he screeched and fell into the puddle of wine on the floor but the one he really got was the arrogant-looking prick who’d complained about the fish, him and his mousy girlfriend, got them so bad they both fell back off their chairs, the guy falling through the plate-glass window out to the sidewalk and he watched with fascination as a slab of glass as big as the table they’d been sitting at slid free of its metal sash like a see-through guillotine and damn near separated the cocksucker’s head from his body.
People in the other sections were screaming right along with him, some weird choral music and mobbing the doorway so that Theo had to push his way through, Theo looking scared and furious but coming at him all the same the stupid fuck and he could hear the cooks yelling in Greek and Spanish and heading for the back door as he whirled and smashed the pot of regular against the left side of Theo’s head but then didn’t even wait to see him slide and fall. He leaned over the service counter to the kitchen and it was as though the cooks had left the cleaver sitting there just for him just for his own personal use, his personal favorite weapon of choice so he headed toward the men’s room, Lindsay the first one curious about the all commotion outside so that her head was the first he used it on bye bitch and then he had to tug the damn thing free of her which was not the way it was with the doggies and kitties back in Tennessee, more difficult than that and by the time he got it out of her fallen body they were on him, all of them, the bleeding guy and his wife and even Diane for god’s sake even her so that he got only one more swipe in across the belly of the guy’s wife so good and so goddamn deep that he was watching her guts spill out of her even as the guy’s bloody fist descended and everything went suddenly black.
Hours later when it was over, when the ambulances had pulled away and the cops were finished and the busboys had mopped up the blood, when the glassier had patched the window with plywood and the gawking crowds were gone Diane was left alone at the bar waiting for Tasos, owner of the place and poor Theo’s cousin, to come in from Westchester and assess all the damage.
The bottle of Absolut kept her company. The bottle was her buddy.
She drank and considered that she’d gotten to know the people in station two better than she’d ever wanted to.
She hadn’t held out much hope for Mrs. Wolper but the medics felt differently. She’d make it, they thought. He hadn’t managed to slash through any organs. But the Wolpers were going to have to put off their trip to Greece for quite a while. Danny Martino’s burns were not serious and his friend John Walters had escaped the entire episode just by watering down his pants leg. Likewise the Japanese couple, who’d done some fancy ducking. Hal Reese had died flooding the sidewalk with arterial blood. Jan Resnick’s burns, cuts and bruises were stunningly lucky and superficial and would heal though she wasn’t so sure about her heart. The woman had come completely unglued by the loss of the guy. She guessed they must have had something pretty damn special together.
Theo was badly cut and burned but he’d live.
Lindsey had been twenty-two years old. Diane had liked her.
She sat drinking her Absolut and thinking about Phil’s last words to her just as the cops led him off to the squad car. Some weird shit about them sharing an apartment together.
She thought about her apartment. What she owed. The tips she didn’t get tonight.
She lit another smoke and thought about the mob joint down in Little Italy.
Almost wondered if they were hiring.
Thanks to the folks at the Aegean,
especially David and Carolyn.
~*~
When I was a kid in high school Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey made a big and lasting impression on me and I’ve used his notion about the co-mingling of the fates of various strangers twice. First in The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard which even mimicked Wilder’s title and here in “Station Two.”
New York bars and restaurants are excellent places to observe people and their body language—which often tells a story pretty clearly—and poor Jan and her bastard lover Hal were based on one such observation over nearly half an hour.
—JK
Elusive
The first time Kovelant stood in line for Sleepdirt was just before Halloween.
He didn’t stand there long. It was raining cold and hard and the wind was high on 84th and his four-dollar umbrella wasn’t up to protecting him from either. His face was wet and his shoes were practically swamped. The tickets were preview giveaways. Hence the line around the block. Kovelant decided to wait for the reviews and the release date and then maybe go. Ten bucks was ten bucks and free was free but pneumonia would cost him more than that in co-pays alone. He hailed a cab home and slipped Dawn of the Dead into the VCR and turned up the heat.
The second time was the weekend after Halloween and by then the reviews were in. “A mini-masterpiece of terror,” said the New York Times. “The first real scare-the-hell-out-of-you horror movie since Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer,” said the Daily News. “Blacker than black!” raved the Post.
He’d heard it all before but if you were a fan, you went. It was that simple.
So he stood in line—inside this time thank god, since this night was just as bad as the first one—at the Sony complex across the street and watched the SOLD OUT signs appear. 5:45. 8:00. 10:10. The damn thing was a hit and this was New York City. He’d have to wait.
His life, such as it was, intruded and he didn’t get to try again until early December. The intrusion came in the form of an old lover. Maggie was in town from Vermont on a first-ever Manhattan holiday shopping spree and intent on seeing sights, not horror movies. But the nice thing about writing was that he had the time to accompany her. They hit 5th Avenue and Madison for the shopping and the Planetarium, Rockefeller Center and the Metropolitan Museum for the sights. After dinner nights they hit the sack in Maggie’s hotel. This with a lust uncommon for the Mags he’d known back in their hippie days despite the husband and pair of kids she was shopping for.
He put her in a cab to the airport on a Saturday night and Sunday he went to the movies.
There wasn’t much of a line this time. The holiday feel-good blockbusters had weighed in solid competition. Waiting for the doors to open, Sleepdirt ticket finally clutched in hand, Kovelant felt the slightest twinge in his lower back, a pinch, the sense of something bunching there so he shifted left and then right from the waist to loosen it up. When the line started moving a single step was all it took to shoot a white-knuckle bolt of pain off his hip and up into his neck and shoulder. A second step confirmed he was in trouble.
By the time he reached the nose-ringed, quadruple-earpierced blonde collecting tickets, the pain was an electric eel squirming throughout the entire right side of his body.
The girl handed him his stub. Then smiled.
“Hey, you’re…”
“Jesus,” he gasped. “I gotta sit.”
He hoped the girl didn’t think he meant he was Jesus. Though he didn’t much care either way.
The last aisle seat was empty so he took it. Normally he sat closer. Maybe he’d move up later, he thought.
Or maybe not.
Sitting was worse.
The eel had found its way into his head now. It felt like it was expanding there while at the same time constricting at his neck, forcing the neck down into his shoulders. The shoulders in turn seemed somehow to want to find their way into his lower back. The skin across his shoulders felt too tight for his goddamn body. He wasn’t even sure he could get out of the damn seat but knew he’d better try. This just wasn’t working. He gripped the armrests and thrust himself up. His right arm felt weak as a kitten.
Standing was better. Not good, but better.
The audience was still filing in so he moved slowly through and past them, afraid the slightest nudge might send him sprawling. At the entrance the ticket-girl smiled at him again.
“Popcorn’s over that way,” she said. “Men’s room, that way. Hey listen, what’s your name? I forget.”
She sounded serious. He couldn’t figure why in the world she would be. Did she think she knew him? He wasn’t about to say Jesus again though or anything else for that matter. He just wanted out of there.
Happily his apartment was right across the street. If he could get there.
What he wanted was a bed.
His doorman looked at him oddly. It didn’t surprise him. He was practically bent in half by then. He took the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor.
And it was only when he’d dry-swallowed a handful of ibuprofen and got into that bed that he thought, I can’t believe it, I missed that movie again. His GP, a neurologist, an MRI and two months of electrotherapy, ultrasound, cold and hot packs and various deep-muscle PT manipulations later, Sleepdirt was long out of the theatres but three months after that, available on tape. He rented a cassette from Tower Video. Took it home and popped in the VCR. Following the credit sequence, in which a screaming, bloody middle-aged man is being dragged by his legs into what appears to be a hotel laundry chute, he heard a crackling sound coming from the VCR and the screen went blank.
He hit EJECT on his remote and nothing happened. He did the same on the VCR proper. He opened the tape-port manually and tried pushing it, then lifting it out with his fingers. Finally he dug it out with a butter knife. Inside the cassette he could see a knot of mangled tape.
The following day he dropped it off at Tower Video and asked if he could replace it with another. The clerk punched it into his computer.
“We’re out,” he said. “Friday night. Movie’s popular. We got DVDs in stock, though.”
“I don’t have a DVD player.”
The guy looked at him as if he’d just announced he molested children.
“Try after the weekend. Wednesday, Thursday maybe. Slow days, y’know?”
Slow days for slow customers, he thought. Right.
On the way home he stopped at the Food Emporium. He bought some cheese and deli meats and a fresh loaf of rye. The pudgy little Spanish girl behind the counter practically had to stand on tiptoes to weigh the stack of bologna. He thought she had a pretty smile.
“Don’t I know you?” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You look familiar.”
“I come in a lot I guess. I’m right across the street.”
“Yeah, probably that’s it. Well, have a nice day.”
“You too.”
He worked on his book over the weekend and on Tuesday went back to Tower Video and picked up a copy of Sleepdirt on his credit slip for the first try. The clerk, a younger guy, eyebrow-pierced and shaved bald, looked up at him over his glasses and laughed.
“Checkin’ yourself out, huh?”
“Excuse me?”
“Me, I thought you were terrific. Small part, sure, but you were great in it, man. Don’t they give the actors copies? I thought they did.”
“I’m not understanding you.”
The clerk looked at him again more closely.
“That’s not you?”
“What’s not me?”
“In the movie? I mean, man, you could pass for his twin brother.”
“I don’t have a twin brother.”
“See, I thought you were this actor, this guy in the movie. Amazing death scene. Absolutely beautiful. I can’t believe you’re not him. Sorry, man.”
He handed him the plastic yellow bag.
“You have a good day.”
Kovelant walked out shaking his head. Now that was interesting. Maybe it explained the ticket-taker at the Sony complex and the counter girl at the Food Emporium. Now that he thought of it he’d even been aware lately of getting looks on the street a bit more often than his less-than-perfect features might ordinarily compel in passers-by.
He had a look-alike in this elusive movie here. How about that?
He put Sleepdirt in the VCR and turned on the television and prepared to settle in.
Nothing.
No sound, no picture.
Nothing at all.
He checked the wall plug and the connections and both were fine. He unplugged the set and plugged it in again. He unplugged it a second time and plugged in the clock-radio instead. The clock ran perfectly. He called Manhattan Cable and after twenty minutes of recorded music learned that there were no transmission problems in his area, thank you very much for calling.
His television had suddenly died on him. Shit!
And he thought finally, what the hell is it with this movie?
“I think it’s jinxed,” he told Maggie later.
Since her trip to New York they’d taken to phoning more often. He wondered what her husband thought about that or if he knew. He could hear her pull on the joint on the other end of the line. He’d given up the stuff years ago.
“I haven’t seen it,” she said.
“That’s the point. Neither have I.”
He heard her exhale and then there was silence for a while.
“Maybe it’s like dreams.”
“Huh?”
“You know. You know how they say movies are like dreams?”
“Who says movies are like dreams?”
“They do. Except they’re mass dreams, not individual ones. We sit in a theatre and have this…dream together. And this actor, he’s supposed to look just like you, right? Could almost be your twin brother.”
“Yeah. So?”
“He dies in it, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, they also say you can’t see yourself die in a dream. That you always wake up first right before you die. That you have to.”
It was the common wisdom.
“So you’re saying…”
“That you can’t see the movie because you can’t see yourself die in it. I mean, maybe in some way it is you. Not some look-alike.”
“I think I’d know it if I were in a movie. I think my checkbook would know it too.”
He could almost hear her shrug but her voice had that playful tone to it.
“More things in heaven and earth, Hieronymus…”
“Mags, honey, you’ve got two kids to take care of and a husband to feed every night. You tripping again?”
“Of course not. Though probably my kids are. Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Just finish a Stephen King book, by any chance?”
“Nope. Tell you what I’ll do. You sit tight. I’ve got a little mom-and-pop video store just a few blocks away. I’ll go over and rent the thing. I mean, so far nobody’s told me I look like anybody in what’s it called? Sleepwalk?”
“Sleepdirt.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I’ll check it out for you. Richard will think I’m nuts, but…”
He needed to shop for a new TV set anyway. Check out Consumer Reports.
“Okay, why not. Go for it.”
“I’ll pick it up tomorrow. I can watch it tomorrow night.”
“It’s supposed to be a rough one, Mags. I know how you feel about these things. I’d stay off the dope if I were you.”
“If you stay off the sauce. I’ll call you, sweets.”
And she did. Two nights later the phone rang. He knew it was her even before he answered.
“Sorry, but Richard and I got into it night before last so I only just watched it now.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“You mean Richard? No, we’re okay now. I think. The movie, though…”
“What about it?”
“Well, it was rough, all right.”
“I figured. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. You warned me. But that actor? The one who looks like you? My god! does he ever! I could have sworn it was you. Even the voice is the same. And you know that slouch you have? The posture thing I’m always on your case for? Well…”
“How does he die, Mags?” He suddenly had to know.
“Jesus! That part’s awful. He…”
He heard static.
The line went dead.
“Mags? Can you hear me? Mags? Shit!”
He hung up and dialed again. Busy. Maybe she was trying to call him, he thought. He hung up the phone and waited. A minute passed. Two. He dialed again and got another busy signal. She was not the type for a cell phone and he’d never bothered to get her e-mail address. He hated e-mail. Now he wished he had.
Two hours later it was past midnight and he’d tried a dozen times or more and every time it was busy. He’d even asked an operator to check and see if there were problems on the line. She said the line was in use, period. Who the hell was Maggie talking to? If anybody. He had lurid fantasies of her husband strangling her with the phone cord in a sudden jealous rage.
He didn’t know Richard. It was possible.
But highly improbable. No, that wasn’t it.
You are not meant to see this movie, he thought.
And then he thought, ridiculous, the hell you’re not and went to bed, resolved.
The following day he was up early, before nine o’clock—unusual for him—and by ten he was out the door. It was cold and dark and snow looked likely. He found a cab on Broadway. At Circuit City he made the purchase of an RCA Colortrak television set with a sixteen-inch screen, a Panasonic Progressive Scan DVD player, and a Panasonic Omnivision VCR—though as far as he knew there was nothing wrong with the old one. He paid an additional $72.50 for same-day delivery and installation.
When the technician had everything hooked up and explained to him the mysteries of DVD technology—it took a while—he got on his coat and hat and headed through a light dusting of snow for Tower Video. There were six rental copies of Sleepdirt available on tape. He guessed it was a slow day. He piled them into his basket. There were ten rental copies available on DVD. He took them too. There were twenty on DVD for sale and another dozen on tape. He took all of them. By the time he got to the checkout counter he was grinning.
