Pocket Kings (24 page)

Second and I went out that night for dinner: hamburgers, fries, and beer at the indomitable Corner Bistro. I told him about New York. I explained the layout of the city, how addresses flowed west and east from Fifth Avenue, I told him how to get around, what to see, where to go and not go. We could also go to a museum tomorrow, I told him, go to a great restaurant tomorrow night. If he wanted to see Ground Zero I would suck it up and take him and I'd take him across the river to Newark, where my mother and father grew up, or I'd show him Teaneck and the neighborhood I grew up in. I proudly told him about the history of the city—a city whose mere outline on a map sometimes reduces me to sentimental tears—and about Peter Minuit and the Great Fire of 1835 and George Washington at Fraunces' Tavern and how the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge had engendered the great city as we know it today.

I told him all these things and was so proud to live here that I got all choked up and my voice cracked, and when I was done he asked me, “So how far away is Atlantic City?”

“
Th
is is where you steal my money?” Second Gunman said when I showed him my study after dinner.

He sussed out the operation, the computer on the desk, the books on the shelves, the view out the window. When Cynthia came in to say she was going to sleep—her plane to West Virginia left early next morning—Second asked me, “So what's this a picture of?”

“You know,” Cynthia said, “I always wanted to know that too.”

“It's just a pear in a bowl,” I told them. “
Th
at's all.”

“And that?” he asked. “Who's that?”

“Just some guy. Just some guy in Paris, okay?”

“Is he always so touchy?” my visitor asked my lovely wife.

“I'm going to sleep,” she said.

A few seconds after she left, Second asked me how an ugly blumper like me could marry a pretty flinny like that.
Th
is wasn't the exact slang he used, but it was something to that effect. I told him that years ago I was thinner and had a lot more promise.

“So these are your books, huh?”

He was looking at the shelf with the foreign editions of my two books.

Second told me he wanted to get a few hands in before sleep, and he got on my computer and logged in under his name. He played five hands and stopped when he was up $200, then I logged in under my name and played. During the second hand I saw that
Plague
had slipped 10,000 places on Amazon. Between the second hand and the third an article on Nexis revealed to me that a Frank Dixon who worked for Boeing had been promoted to vice-president. During the third hand Toll House Cookie, playing as the ten-gallon-hatted Cowboy, came to the table.

Chip Zero:
Hey, Hoss!

Toll House Cookie:
Yo, Chip.

Chip Zero:
You'll never guess who's here.

Toll House Cookie:
You, me, two other nobodies. Why?

Chip Zero:
No, I mean HERE. In my apartment. In real life. Second is!

Toll House Cookie:
Th
e hell he is.

I explained that Second Gunman was standing only few inches away, then Second played as me for a few seconds (and won me $300 with two 7s). It took about four minutes before the occasionally ornery Cookie finally believed I wasn't playing a prank on him.

Second asked him about going to Atlantic City and while THC was typing, I told the Blackpooler: “Look, you really don't want to go there. It's a void . . . it's a first-class shit hole.”

Cookie, via IM, agreed.

Toll House Cookie:
Nah, don't go there, man. Try Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun.

I shook my head. I didn't want to go there either.
Th
ey weren't voids or first-class shit holes per se but they just weren't for me.

Toll House Cookie:
Or just go to Vegas.

I told Johnny that Vegas would have to wait until his next trip, but even though he seemed like a nice guy, hadn't been untoward, had indeed been quite civil and hadn't groped my wife, I didn't want there to be any second trip. Still, I had to be nice.

Toll House Cookie:
Why don't you try to get into a few local games in NYC?

Chip Zero:
Nah. We're okay.

Second Gunman, standing over my chair, poked my shoulder blade and said, “Yeah, get an address from THC. We'll play. You could break your real-life poker cherry, you gobshite.”

I looked up at him, at his mischievous eyes and reddish mustache, and it dawned upon me: these next few days might not be so easy. I disliked having visitors stay over even if they were absolute saints, which this one wasn't.

Cookie IM'ed me the address of a poker joint on the Upper East Side. It was just off Lexington Avenue, in the eighties, not far from the posh apartment building Cynthia grew up in.

Toll House Cookie:
It's underneath a bodega. Walk in and go to the cash register and say to the guy, “Dónde está Big Lou?” You got that? “Dónde está Big Lou?”
Th
at's the password.

Chip Zero:
Dónde está Big Lou. Right. But wait . . . what if there
is
a guy named Big Lou there?

Toll House Cookie:
Th
ere is, dude!
Th
at's why I just told you to ask for him! He's downstairs running the show. Lou's cool. Drives through my toll lane nearly every day. Tell him Cookie sent you.

Chip Zero:
Okay, but what if the cops come while we're there?

Toll House Cookie:
Th
ey'll already be there.
Th
ey're the security guards.

A minute later I said good-bye and logged off.

“Is this,” I asked Second Gunman, “really what you want to do in New York?”

I reminded him of New York City's amazingly diverse culture, about the incredible restaurants, the finest shopping in the world, the subtle tints of pink and violet over the Hudson River at sunset, the hot dogs and iconic roller coaster on Coney Island, the Rembrandts at the Met and Matisses at MOMA.

“Let's go play poker,” he said.

“Johnny, when did you think you were going to do this?”

“Wifey's asleep. C'mon, Chip. Why not right now?”

I told him no.

Yes, this is what he really wanted to do in New York.

Th
e next morning Cynthia woke me up before she left.
DOA,
I saw, was in her carry-on Furla bag. As soon as she was out the door, it felt like it always did when I knew we were going to be apart for a while: as though all the warmth, goodness, and comfort had been sucked out of me in a flash and that I was living in a cold and lonely vacuum.

Second had a weird list of things he wanted to see in New York. He didn't want to visit any museums but did want to see the no-longer-extant Belmore Cafeteria, where a scene in
Taxi Driver
was filmed. He didn't want to see the Statue of Liberty but did want to see the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid killed Nancy. No Empire State Building, but the subway station where a scene in
Ghost
was filmed. As I've never seen the movie I wasn't sure where that was, so I just took him to any old station and he fell for it.

At one point in the middle of the afternoon I went to my bank and got out $7,000 in cash. Second Gunman didn't have to; he had brought about $20,000 (stuffed into the ripped lining of his suede jacket) with him to New York. We were going to play.

Walking along Union Square in the early evening to get a taxi to go to Big Lou's bodega casino, I noticed there was a reading at the Barnes & Noble.
Th
e book, I saw from the window display, was a memoir called
Lost and Found
by Charlie L. Something.
Th
e reading would begin at eight. I looked at my watch and saw that eight was only five minutes away.

“Hey, Second,” I said. He was still in his suede jacket, even though it was in the forties out and windy, and was wearing baggy jeans and a blue chamois shirt. “Let's go inside.”

“What a weird time to decide you wanna buy a book.”

“I don't.”

We went inside, wove our way through and around the stacks and tables to where the reading was. Truth be told, Second and I had enjoyed a long lunch together and had drunk a bottle of wine; we'd just had dinner and another two bottles. At the end of both meals I was speaking with an unconvincing Irish brogue and an even less convincing burr. We were primed.

We took seats toward the rear.
Th
ere were only about fifteen people there but one of them looked familiar, even from the back. It was Beverly Martin, I was pretty sure.

Charlie L. Something adjusted the mike to a smattering of applause and coughing, thanked us for showing up and began to read. He resembled a lesser-known president—Polk, Arthur, or Garfield— but without the wig, muttonchops, or beard. His book was about his privileged childhood and preppy adolescence, his descent into drug abuse (including siphoning off his dying father's morphine drip) and living on the street, and subsequent recovery at the Shining Path Clinic in the Southwest and conversion from Presbyterianism to Episcopalism (which for me was like relocating from Park Avenue to Fifth Avenue). I'd read
Lost and Found
's reviews and, as usual with books of this type, from St. Augustine to Malcolm X to the present, the early screwed-up nasty parts were way more interesting than the later recovery parts. Presently he was going on about how the refulgent façade of Shining Path glittered in the sun “like some splendid, otherworldly cathedral on some lonely, lofty hill, built all of stained glass and drenched in God's great golden light.”

“Zzzzzzzzzz,”
Second whispered.

“Could you say that louder please?” I asked. He didn't get it so I whispered: “Snore louder! So everyone can hear it? Come on. I'm giving you a free place to stay!”

“Bollocks! You don't . . . What's this fribblin' kranswaggle ever done to you?”

“Had a book published within the last two years!”

Charlie L. Something droned on and the only person who seemed as though she might be paying attention was the woman who might be Bev . . . so now I knew it was her.

“Get on with it!” Second called out to Charlie. “Get on with it, gobshite!”

Charlie stopped reading for a second, then resumed. I slid down in my metal chair.

A few sentences later Second called out: “Is this really the best you can do?
Th
is is like takin' foiv Ambien CR's!”

People turned around to look at Johnny, and Beverly Martin was surprised to see me at the reading but even more surprised to see me sitting next to the rambunctious boor who was disrupting it.

Charlie resumed but after a few more sentences Second stood up and yelled: “FREEBIRD!”

A Barnes & Noble employee came over and asked us to please leave. We got up and were making our way out when I heard Bev call my name. We stopped—we were deep in the shadowy thick of the Self-Help section—and she approached us.

“Frank!” she said.

I introduced her to my buddy Johnny Tyronne.

“You were heckling Charles,” she said to him. “
Th
at wasn't very nice.”

“Well, it wasn't very nice of him to be so boring,” Second said to her.

“I didn't think he was boring.”

Of course she didn't. For her if it was in print it was fascinating and sacred. She probably regarded Chinese take-out menus as classic texts.

“Well, I guess we're just not going to be mates then. Pity, that.”

“Deke Rivers called me,” I said to her.

“Oh yes . . . I gave him your number. How did that work out?”

I thought she got a kick out of siccing a vanity press editor on me and that she enjoyed the feeling of being a bar bouncer stamping an ultraviolet
LOSER
on my hand for the night.