Snitch World (6 page)

A man passing the other way delivered a blow to the trunk of his torso with a magnitude considerably greater than a jostle.

“The fuck you watch where you—,” Klinger rebounded, both hands snatched from their pockets and ready to pound his impotent despond into the frame of the other, no matter the circumstance.

“Tsk,” leered the other man, fashioning his several yellowed teeth into a close-up portrait of a window through which somebody has heaved a chair. “Kinda touchy for eight-thirty in the ayem, ain’t we?”

Klinger’s vehemence, despite its being so suddenly uncorked, allowed for a moment’s pause, which allowed him to recognize his interloper before he punched him. “Frankie,” Klinger replied, surprised, but not so surprised as to forego appending “Geeze,” Frankie’s street moniker. They clasped hands, though not in the handshake known and employed throughout the developed nations, but each by lacing the knuckles of the right hand with the other’s as if grasping the handle on a stein of beer.

“Frankie,” Klinger greeted him, “What the hell are you up to?”

“Oh,” Frankie replied easily, “about a hundred a day.”

It was a joke and Klinger laughed. But then, he squinted, giving Frankie the once-over, the joke may well also be the truth. “When did you get out?”

Frankie shrugged.

“Clear?”

Frankie shook his head. “Parole.”

“Does that mean you’re not supposed to be talking to me?”

Frankie shrugged. “You never did no hard time—did you?”

“Nah,” Klinger admitted. And, though it diminished his status with the likes of Frankie and Chainbang, he didn’t mind admitting it. Indeed, status with the likes of these guys seemed a very small price to pay for a dearth of prison time. Very small.

“So let’s hang,” Frankie smiled.

Oh joy, Klinger said to himself.

“Care for a drink?”

Klinger brightened. Frankie was the odd hophead who didn’t mind alcohol. Klinger could worry about the future later. “I care for a drink,” he said.

“Know a place a man can smoke, too?”

Which is how they wound up on adjacent stools at the Hawse Hole at 9:35 in the morning.

“Excellent,” Frankie assayed, looking around.

“Joint closes at two in the ayem and reopens four point five hours later.”

“Half-hour after the sugar kicks in,” Frankie surmised, not without a hint of admiration. “Gives a man time to drag a comb over his head.”

“Ya gotta think they know their client base,” Klinger agreed.

The bartender swabbed the plank between them. “What’s your pleasure, gents?”

Frankie gestured politely.

“You holding?” Klinger asked frankly.

Frankie laid a twenty on the bar.

“Hot coffee with cream and sugar and a double-shot of Jameson,” Klinger said without hesitation.

“You want the Jameson back or—,” the bartender started to ask.

“The fuck kinda pussy drink is that shit?” erupted a man two stools beyond Frankie.

“You look as if you’ve already had a hard day, pal,” Klinger told the interloper. “Me, I’m just getting up.”

“How about you, buddy?” the bartender said, as he poured coffee into a white ceramic diner cup. “Same?”

“I’ll have a stinger,” Frankie said deliberately, as if addressing their bellicose neighbor.

“Okay,” the bartender said smoothly, as he backed up Klinger’s coffee with six cubes of sugar, a quart carton of cream, and four ounces of Jameson. “And how do you like your stingers?”

“Brandy from the well.”

“Yeah?”

“White crème de menthe.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe five to one.”

“Gotcha …”

“Ice.”

“Sure.”

Frankie waited.

The bartender waited.

“That’s it,” Frankie said.

“Yeah.” The bartender turned and began to search among the bottles behind him. “Aha,” he said after a moment. He set a bottle on the bar. “I only got the green shit.”

“That’ll do,” Frankie told him.

“On the rocks,” the bartender assumed.

Frankie nodded patiently. “That’s the ice.”

The bartender put it together, served it, went away. “When you don’t know what the fuck they’re asking you for,” Frankie observed, “always ask them how they would build it if they were in your shoes.”

“Works like a charm,” Klinger agreed.

“Especially in a shithole like this place,” said the man two stools away. His eyes were barely open. “Stinger my ass.”

“You gotta point,” Frankie said, lighting a cigarette.

Klinger raised the double. “Health and money.”

The bartender put an ashtray on the bar in front of them.

Frankie, blowing smoke at the ceiling, added, “And the time to enjoy them.”

The whiskey tasted mighty fine, although Klinger noticed that it aggravated a certain tightness, one might even say a pain, in his duodenum.

The man who had thought to object to Frankie’s taste in drink laid his arm on the bar and his head on his arm and went straight to sleep. A few stools beyond him, where the bar made a right angle and headed toward the toilets,
despite a certain intervening gloom, Klinger could see that the vertex of the right angle was already strewn with glasses, an ashtray full of butts, and two or three eviscerated dollar bags of tortilla chips. Each of the two men standing there was showing the other his knife.

Frankie fished an L-shaped piece of wire out of his pocket and twirled the longer leg of the L between the thumb and first three fingers of the hand between himself and Klinger. “Need a score?” He displayed the wire between them and below the edge of bar, so only Klinger could see it.

“Sure,” Klinger said, “but I’m no dipper.”

“Leave the dipping to me.” The wire disappeared, and Frankie gave his cigarette some attention. “But I been in school and I’m a little rusty. The other night—.” He directed a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “Anyway, I could use a shill.”

The two men at the far end of the bar called the bartender, who attached his hand to an open quart of tequila on his way down there.

“Since when don’t you go it alone?”

Frankie drew an ashtray close enough to tap his cigarette on its rim. “Since my second strike.”

The two guys standing at the far end of the bar clicked glasses, downed their shots, and slammed the empties onto the bar.

Klinger sipped a little coffee. Really, really awful coffee. Plus it was cold. Plus it immediately aggravated the twinge in the lower forecourt of his gut. He traded the coffee for the whiskey and cleansed his palette.

“That sounds like a good reason for you to be, say, delivering groceries to shut-ins.”

Frankie affected to brighten. “Sign me up. I bet them shut-ins got all kinds of stuff laying around. Stuff they don’t need anymore. Gold chains and jewelry, for example. Watches. Hundred-dollar bills. Sterling silver bedpans.”

Klinger laughed. “They haven’t been letting two-time losers have rings of keys to apartments all over the city since the dot-com times, Frankie, back when nobody could find good help.”

“I was inside at the time,” Frankie agreed, “but I hear stories. Unbelievable stories.”

“In every case,” Klinger assured him, “they were almost certainly true.”

Now, at the far end of the bar, thumps were to be heard. One two three four, four three two one. Syncopated thumps.

Klinger leaned away from the bar so as to see beyond the snoring drunk.

“They said it was like the Wild West,” Frankie continued. “They said there was gold lining the streets, just waiting to be picked up. They said it was every man for himself, no quarter asked or given.”

“That’s a damned accurate description of the dot-com times,” Klinger said. “What the fuck are those guys doing?”

Frankie, who had made no sign of paying attention to the far end of the bar, said, “You know mumblety-peg?”

One two three four.

Klinger thought about it. “You throw a knife at a tree. If your knife sticks, the other guy has to do it with his knife.”

Four three two one.

“When somebody misses, he loses a point. Like that?”

“Yeah,” Frankie said lazily. “Another way you can play, two guys stand six feet apart, each with his feet close together. At attention, like. The guy who goes first, he throws a knife close to one or another foot of the other guy. Eight or ten inches away, say. If the knife sticks in the ground, the guy has to move his foot out to it. Then it’s his turn. If his throw sticks in the ground, the first guy has to move his foot out to the knife. And so forth. The first guy to fall over loses.”

Klinger almost didn’t laugh. “That sounds about as useful as watching television.”

“Inside,” said Frankie, “I learned to hate television.”

“So what’s that got to do—.”

“Them guys down there are running a variation on the theme,” Frankie said. “First, they down a shot of tequila.”

“I saw that.”

“Then, they flip a coin.”

“I missed that.”

“Guy that loses spreads his hand flat on the bar, fingers wide as they can go, like this.”

“Okay.”

“Then he takes his knife and stabs the point outside the thumb, then between thumb and forefinger, forefinger and fuck-you finger, fuck-you finger and ring finger, ring finger and pinky, outside. Then he goes back.”

Klinger watched Frankie stab the fuck-you finger of his right hand sequentially between the fingers of his left hand, spread on the bar, and back.

“One two three four five six,” Frankie counted, “six five four three two one.”

“Isn’t that kind of hard on the bar?” Klinger said.

Frankie shrugged. “Depends on what kinda joint you’re in.”

“Guess so,” Klinger said.

“If you don’t stab yourself …” Frankie continued.

“… The other guy takes a round,” Klinger concluded. “But first,” Frankie cautioned, “you down another shot.” As he said this, the bartender passed them with a tray of shot glasses, each brimming with tequila, a salt shaker, an ashtray heaped with lime sections.

“Then you do another round,” Frankie said.

“Until the inevitable,” Klinger concluded.

“Yeah,” Frankie said. “And there’s a lot of variations.”

“Like … ?”

Frankie shrugged. “Each round goes a little faster.”

“That sounds subjective.”

“Many’s the argument,” Frankie agreed. “A less subjective variation is, the first round you go once, you have your drink, and the second round you go twice.”

From the far end of the bar, a knife point touched the bar sixteen times.

“They musta heard me,” Frankie said.

“Let me guess,” Klinger said.

Frankie extended his hand, palm up. “After the second round, you could do two shots.”

“And so forth.”

“
Voilà
,” Frankie said.

“A little more interactive than television.”

Frankie shrugged. “There you go.”

“Whatever happened to canasta?” Klinger asked. “You ever play this knife game?”

“Are you kidding?” Frankie asked. “I’m an artist. My hands is all I got.”

“Of course,” Klinger said. “I forgot.”

“Them guys down there,” Frankie said, though he’d yet to turn around for a look at them, “they probably make their living with their brains.”

Klinger smiled.

“We ain’t come to my favorite variation,” Frankie said sleepily.

“What’s that?”

Frankie pointed at his hand. “Instead of stabbing the knife between the fingers of your own hand, you stab it between the fingers of the other guy’s hand.”

“That’s a prescription for escalation,” Klinger said, moving his drink away from Frankie.

Frankie nodded.

Somebody at the far end of the bar yelled “FUCK!” “Fuck?” The guy with his head on the bar woke up. “Did somebody say fuck?”

“Fuck! Shit! Ow!” the other voice continued.

A hearty guffaw issued from a third party. “Your round, motherfucker!”

“Ow! shit!”

“Let’s get out of here,” Frankie said to Klinger. “Finish your drink.”

“Shit, shit, shit …”

Frankie slid his stinger over the bar. “You finish it.”

“You fuckin’ crybaby,” declared the third voice.

Klinger and Frankie Geeze exited the Hawse Hole, on Polk just below Geary, at 10:35 in the a.m.

“Son of a bitch,” Frankie said. He donned a very dark pair of designer shades against the overcast and smoothed the pinstriped lapels of his suit jacket.

Klinger had noticed the quality of Frankie’s suit. But aloud he observed, “That oughta keep the rain off your peepers.”

“Say,” Frankie said, “I gotta make a stop.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Klinger said.

“You hungry?”

“You see a door lately that I don’t fit through?”

“No,” Frankie said frankly.

“Okay,” Klinger said.

“I know just the place,” Frankie said.

“You buying?”

“Dude,” Frankie said. “A guy like me don’t sweat the odd twenty-dollar bill.”

Klinger regarded Frankie with incredulity. “You’re taking us someplace where breakfast cost twenty dollars?”

Frankie regarded him back. “Did I say that?”

“Well, no. Not exactly. But if that’s your intention, let me take you someplace where it costs ten and you can give me the difference.”

“I can see I’m dealing with a fiduciary sharpie, here.”

Klinger drew himself up to his full five foot eight. “Not for nothing do I live in a SRO hotel.”

Frankie resumed walking. “Not for much, either, I’ll wager.”

Klinger deflated. “True.”

“Nevertheless, I can see that I’m going to have to watch my step with you.”

“Hey,” Klinger said modestly, “it’s not like you’re on the yard.”

Never one to be easily fazed, Frankie stopped again, looked at Klinger again, then resumed walking again. “I’ll tell the world,” he muttered, laughing. Abruptly he wheeled and said, “You read the
New York Times
?”

“Every day,” Klinger lied.

“Here.” Frankie handed Klinger a twenty and pointed at a doorway. “If you can fit through that door, get one. Keep the change.”

The doorway was actually next to a pass-through into a newsstand, of the type increasingly rare, through which only merchandise and money need fit. Porn magazines, cigarettes, porn DVDs, gum, porn VHSs, and not a few newspapers including, voilà, the
New York Times
. Klinger made the purchase and pocketed $17.80. Which fattened the bankroll, he calculated happily, to $23.69. Thing is looking up. That’s right: thing, singular. As in, I see that you’re getting your duck in a row. As in, chins up.