“Nope.”
“What say we talk about it over a beer and a burger at the Irish Pub.”
“I can’t. I’m going out tonight.”
“On a Friday night?” I asked. “You have a date?”
“It’s not a date, not really. It’s a blind date. A blind date is more an interview with a prospective date, an exchange of resumes, silly chatter designed to test social skills, nothing more.”
“I was going to tell you about the new case I picked up today,” I said, a little jealous that she had someplace, anyplace, to go that night.
She stood up. “Tell me tomorrow, I’m going to be late.”
And then she was gone.
I readied to leave and turned out my office lights and then sat down again in my chair to watch the shifting city light play out across the garbage cans in the alley. I could feel it all about me. It was inescapable, falling cold and hard from stars in the sky, dripping from the leafless trees along the polluted city streets, surging down in waves, swirling like the sea about me. The air melted in thick, heavy drops and the spots on the walls danced maniacally and the order of all things was pointlessness and despair and finally death. Its scent lay fetid in the air, rotten, musked, overpoweringly seductive, like the juice of a strange woman. It played across the sallow face of Winston Osbourne in his calamity, it grew despite the X-rays pumped through my father’s lungs, it lay crouched and silent within my heart and infected everything I touched, my practice, my dreams, my relationships. I wanted to get out so bad, out of this life and its manifest pointlessness. I would do anything to get out, anything at all, anything. I was sick to death with the wanting.
When I was in junior high I was picked to perform a genetics experiment with different forms of fruit flies called drosophilae. In the back of the classroom I mated the red-eyed variety with the white-eyed variety and then determined the characteristics of the offspring. Drosophilae were perfect for the experiment because their lives were so short and their reproductive cycle so swift that in a very few days I could follow their genetic adventures through a number of generations. For the length of my experiment they were like pets, and when I was supposed to etherize the final batch of offspring to get a precise count of the red-eyed and white-eyed descendants, a procedure that would inevitably kill a majority, I decided instead to release them. “Go, my friends,” I said as I opened the small vials in which they had been bred. “Be free.” And I watched as successive rows of my classmates waved distractedly at the air. I thought about my friends the drosophilae in those moments when I felt overwhelmed by the evocations of despair swirling around me and envied them their short, sentienceless lives. To fly, to suck at fruit, to mate and reproduce, all with absolutely no consciousness of their inevitable fate.
So what I did that night after Beth left me was what I did most every night. I stopped off at a storefront grill and ordered a cheese steak with ketchup and onions to go and took it home and ate it in front of the television with half a six-pack beside me. Whatever the night, there was always one show almost worth watching and I was able to stretch a whole night of mindlessness around that one show, running from Jeopardy! through prime time through the late news and the talk shows and finally the late late movie on UHF, until I’d fallen asleep on the couch, drugged by all I had seen. That Friday night was like every other night of what my life had become, and for the few blessed moments that I was caught like a science fiction hero in the power of that electron beam I lost whatever sentience I held and became as connected to the now of my life as the simple but noble drosophila.
5
THOUGH I HAD NEVER met Jimmy Moore, I knew his name. I knew thousands of names, actors and criminals, sports heroes and politicians, authors, rock stars, the silly little guy who sells suits on South Street. It is the names who rule the world, the Tina Browns, the Jerry Browns, the Jim Browns. They are the aristocracy of America and whatever their rank, and there is a ranking, from the national to the local to the almost obscure, it is the names who attend the best parties, screw the prettiest people, drink the finest champagne, laugh loudest and longest. Jimmy Moore was a local name, a businessman turned politician, a city councilman with a populist, anti-drug agenda that bridged the lower and middle classes. He was a name with aspirations and a loyal following. A name who would be mayor.
I spent the better part of Monday in the offices of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase listening to Jimmy Moore on the telephone. He wasn’t on the telephone with me, of course, as I was not a name and thus not worth talking to. Instead he was on the phone with Michael Ruffing, a restaurateur whose flashy enterprises in the city had made him a local name among the city’s well-cultured and whose phone at his nightclub, Bissonette’s, named after his partner Zack Bissonette, the currently comatose former second baseman, happened to have been tapped by the FBI. I sat alone at the foot of a long marble table in a huge conference room. Fine antique prints of Old Philadelphia lined the walls: Independence Hall, Carpenters Hall, Christ Church, the Second Bank of the United States. The carpet was thick and blue. A tray of soft drinks lay on a credenza behind me and I didn’t have to pay six bits to open one, they were just there, for me. I can’t help but admit that sitting in that room like an invited guest, sitting there like a colleague, gave me a thrill. I was in the very heart of success, someone else’s success maybe, but still the closest I had ever come to the real thing. And there was a dark joy in my heart the whole of my time there because I knew that if all went right this could be my success, too. So I couldn’t help smiling every now and then as I sat in that conference room with earphones on and a yellow pad before me, listening to a score of cassettes holding Jimmy Moore’s taped conversations with Michael Ruffing.
Moore: Your plan for the riverfront is brilliant. Prescient. But I see problems in council.
Ruffing: Uh, like, what kinds of…
Moore: Jesus, Mikey, you got problems.
Ruffing: I don’t need no more problems.
Moore: Every damn councilman gets a take out of the water going a certain way. That’s why it still looks like the Bronx down there. What you need is a champion. What you need is a Joe Frazier.
Ruffing: Okay. I see that. That’s who I need then, what I’m looking for.
Moore: Take Fontelli. Part of the waterfront’s in his district, so he thinks the whole damn river’s his pisspot.
Ruffing: I don’t want Fontelli, you know. I’ve heard things.
Moore: They’re all true. What have you heard?
Ruffing: He’s, you know. What I heard. Connected.
Moore: Of course he is, Mikey. You know who he’s married to.
Ruffing: I don’t want them.
Moore: Of course not. Of course not. In for an inch and they’re screwing your sister. Now I like your place, you know that. I’m in there almost every week, you know that.
Ruffing: And you don’t stint on the Dom, either.
[laughter]
Moore: Fuck no, you’re either class or you’re shit. Now I could help with this. We could help each other, Mikey.
Ruffing: Okay, yeah.
Moore: But the kind of influence you’re talking about here, well, you know.
Ruffing: Of course. That’s, uh, assumed.
Moore: But I’ll be your Joe Frazier.