Eddie has a crummy place, a real mess, but his mother drives down from Fort Lauderdale every month to spend a couple of days with him, and that’s the only time it’s clean.
When Don left his wife, he took all of his den furniture, and his living room is furnished as a den. He’s got two large comfortable leather chairs, tall, old-fashioned, glass-door bookcases, and a half-dozen framed prints of A Rake’s Progress on the walls. When we’re watching football and drinking beer in Don’s place, it’s like being in some exclusive men’s club.
Hank, because he doesn’t have an office, has almost a third of his living room taken up with cardboard boxes full of drugs and samples of the other medical products his company manufactures. Hank serves as our “doctor.” We get our painkillers, cold remedies, medicated soap, and even free toothbrushes from Hank. Before the strict accountability on drugs started, he could sometimes spare sleeping pills and a few uppers. But not any longer. His company counts them out to him now, in small quantities, and he has to account for the amphetamines he passes out free to the doctors he calls on.
Hank’s apartment is overcrowded with possessions, too, in addition to the medical supplies. Once he has something, he can’t bear to part with it, so his apartment is cluttered. On top of everything else, Hank has a mounted eight-foot sailfish over the couch. He caught it in Acapulco last year, had it mounted for $450 and shipped to Miami. Across the belly, in yellow chalk, he’s written, Hank’s Folly. He still can’t understand how the boat captain talked him into having the sailfish mounted, except that he was so excited, at the time, about catching it. He’s so genuinely unhappy now, about his stupidity in mounting a sailfish, we no longer kid him about it.
When I got to my apartment, I was feeling the effects of the two martinis, so before I took my shower, I put on some coffee to perk. After I showered, I put on a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of tennis shoes. I fixed a very weak Scotch and water in a plastic glass, and carried it with me down to Hank’s apartment.
The other guys were already there. Don, wearing yellow linen slacks and a green knit shirt, was checking the movie pages in the Herald. Eddie wore his denim jacket and jeans with his black flight boots, and winked at me when I came in. He jerked his head toward the short hallway to the bedroom. Hank, of course, was still dressing, and a nose-tingling mixture of talcum powder, Right Guard, and Brut drifted in from the bedroom.
Eddie grinned, and jerked his head toward the bedroom. “An actor prepares,” he said. “Stanislavski.”
“Jesus,” Don said, rattling the paper. “At the Tropical Drive-in they’re showing five John Wayne movies! Who in hell could sit through five John Wayne’s, for Christ’s sake?”
“I could,” I said.
“Me, too,” Eddie said, “but only one at a time.”
“If you go to the first one at seven thirty,” Don said, “you don’t get out till three a.m.!”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Eddie said, “if we all went and took along a couple of cases of beer. It’s better than watching TV from seven thirty till three, and I’ve done that often enough.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you can watch TV in air-conditioned comfort. You aren’t fighting mosquitoes all night.”
“They fog those places for mosquitoes,” Eddie said.
“Sure they do,” Don said, “and it makes them so mad they bite the shit out of you. Here’s one. Listen to this. At the Southside Dixie. Bucket of Blood, The Blood-Letters, The Bloody Vampires, and Barracuda! There’s a theater manager with a sense of humor. He put the barracuda last so they could get all that blood!”
We laughed.
Eddie got up and crossed to the kitchenette table, where Hank kept his liquor and a bucketful of ice. “What’re you drinking, Fuzz-O?”
“I’m nursing this one,” I said.
“Pour me a glass of wine, Eddie,” Don said.
“Blood-red, or urine-yellow?”
“I don’t care,” Don said, “just so you put a couple of ice cubes in it.”
Eddie fixed a Scotch over ice for himself, and brought Don a glass of Chianti, with ice cubes.
“The Southside’s probably our best bet,” I said. “There’ll be fewer women at the horror program than at the John Wayne festival. And besides, there’s a Burger Queen across the highway there on Dixie. We can eat something and watch for Hank when he comes out of the theater.”
“Shouldn’t one of us go with him?” Eddie said.
“It wouldn’t be fair,” Don said. “I don’t think he’ll be able to pick up any women there anyway, but it would be twice as hard to talk some woman into getting into a car with two guys. So we let him go in alone. As Larry says, we can watch the exit from across the Dixie Highway.”
Hank came into the living room, looking and smelling like a jai-alai player on his night off. He wore white shoes with leather tassels, and a magenta slack suit with a silk blue-and-red paisley scarf tucked in around the collar. Hank had three other tailored suits like the magenta — wheat, blue and chocolate — but I hadn’t seen the magenta before. The high-waisted pants, with an uncuffed flare, were double-knits, and so tight in front his equipment looked like a money bag. The short-sleeved jacket was a beltless, modified version of a bush jacket, with huge bellows side pockets.
Don was the only one of us with long hair, that is, long enough, the way we all wanted to wear it. Because of our jobs, we couldn’t get away with hair as long as Don’s. Hank had fluffed his hair with an air-comb, and it looked much fuller than it did when he slicked it down with spray to call on doctors.
“Isn’t that a new outfit?” Eddie said.
“I’ve had it awhile,” Hank said, going to the table to build a drink. “It’s the first time I’ve worn it, is all. I ordered the suit from a small swatch of material. Then when it was made into a suit, I saw that it was a little too much.” He shrugged. “But it’ll do for a drive-in, I think.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that color, Hank,” Don said. “I like it.”
Hank added two more ice cubes to his Scotch and soda. “It makes my face look red, is all.”
“Your face is red,” I said.
“But not as red as this magenta makes it look.”
“When you pay us off tonight,” Eddie said, “it’ll match perfectly.”
Hank looked at his wristwatch. “Suppose we synchronize our watches. It is now, precisely... seven twenty-one. We’ll see who ends up with the reddest faces.”
We checked our watches. For the first time, I wondered if I had made a bad bet. If Hank lost, I consoled myself, at least his overconfidence would preclude my giving him any sympathy.
We decided then to meet Hank at the Burger Queen across from the Southside Drive-in. He would take his Galaxie, and the rest of us would ride down in Don’s Mark IV.
Because we stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy two six-packs of beer, Hank beat us to the Burger Queen by about five minutes. Don gave Hank a can of beer, which he hid under the front seat, and then Hank drove across the highway. It was exactly seven forty-one.
We ordered Double Queens apiece, with fries, and then grabbed a tile table on the side patio to the left of the building. The Burger Queen didn’t serve beer, and the manager couldn’t see us fish our beers out of the paper sack around to the side. We could look directly across the highway and see the drive-in exit.
Unless you’re going out to dinner somewhere, eating at eight p.m. in Miami is on the late side. We were all used to eating around six, and so we were ravenous as we wolfed down the double burgers. We didn’t talk until we finished, and then I gathered up the trash and dumped it into the nearest garbage can. Don ripped the tops off three more beers.