Little Monica from Guest Relations, living large.
“She sure as hell knew what she was doin’ when she had her relations with this guest,” Billy bitched all the time. “ ‘Specially when she forgot to take that damn pill she swore she was on and just didn’t work that one time.”
Gary had met Billy in New York one night when the Magic were in to play the Knicks. Billy’d gone clubbing with some of his teammates, a lot of the ones who’d move on later, and they’d picked up some girls who wanted to go to Elaine’s and see if there was any movie stars up there eating fried calamari. They got there about one in the morning. Gary was drinking with some other cops at the bar, because for all the shit you read in the papers about Woody Allen and movie stars and other celebrity dinks going to Elaine’s, it was a cop bar, too, especially late at night. Elaine liked her celebrity crowd because it was good for business, but liked drinking and hanging around with cops just as much, from the commissioner on down.
Gary saw Billy Cash’s crowd come in the Second Avenue door, watched the fuss everybody made, saw the stroke the room gave him once he got his big table, the one Woody liked in those days, back there where you made the men’s-room turn. Then Gary went back to his drink and the two waitresses from Hanratty’s up the block he was talking up didn’t pay Billy Cash any more mind until the fat drunk actor decided to call Billy out.
The actor, some guy who used to be in the movies but was working on some ABC soap-all this time later, Gary couldn’t remember whether or not it was All My Children or One Life to Live-had some drunk friends with him. So it made him whiskey-brave enough to tell Billy that they should take whatever it was had started between them outside. And Billy, who Gary would find out later usually laughed assholes like this off, didn’t think it was so funny this time.
Plus, the girls he was with wanted a show.
Gary, leaned on the bar near the front window, thought it was all bullshit, that it was a playground face-down and nothing more, and once the air hit them they’d settle it before anybody threw a punch. But then he watched through the window as the actor set his hands as if he’d boxed some in his life. Or maybe played a boxer in the movies. And before Billy Cash knew it, he’d been hooked solid on Second Avenue above his ear and was down on one knee.
The fat actor was lighter on his feet than Gary thought he could be, as much gut he was showing against his white shirt, and as Billy started to get up the actor clipped him again, another left, same place above the ear. Gary couldn’t hear what was happening, just saw the guy’s friends laughing and cheering him on and probably telling him to finish Billy off.
It was then that Gary excused himself from the Hanratty’s girls, came through the door as Billy was getting to his feet, finally having enough sense to get his hands up.
One of the friends said, “Oh, look, the faggot brought a playmate.”
Gary took a fistful of the friend’s long stringy hair with his left hand, pulled out his badge with his right, then pulled the guy close to him and said, “Give us a kiss.”
The fat actor said, “This is between me and him.”
“Unless I say it’s not,” Gary said. “That would be another way of looking at things.”
The actor took a step at Gary now, like he was going to do something about it, badge or not, and as soon as the left hand came forward Gary caught it the way you would a softball in a mitt and said, “The next move anybody makes here will be me breaking that pretty nose of yours.”
It ended right there. The actor and his buddies got into a cab. Billy told the girls to get back inside with his teammates, who somehow managed never to leave the table. Billy started to introduce himself to Gary that night and Gary said, “I know who you are.” Billy told him to come in, join the party, and about a half hour later he said, “How much you make? With the cops, I mean.” Gary couldn’t think of a reason not to tell him, so he did, right down to the thirty-seven cents at the end of it after everything got taken out. And right there, straight out that night, Billy said, “How’d you like to come work for me?”
Gary asked him what that meant, and Billy pretty much laid out what the job would be. Leaving out the parts about the girls. And Gary Hall said yes, just like that, the answer coming out of how tired he was of counting off the days and months and years to his pension, setting up his cameras across the way from some club where the mob boys had watched too many movies, life with Billy Cash sounding like more high life than Gary had ever known, all the way back to growing up under the el on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona.
After that, nobody fucked with Billy Cash and got away with it.
Excepting Monica.
In the early times, those first years, Billy never treated Gary like an employee, some kind of walk-around guy. “My brother,” is the way Billy would introduce him, “just from another mother.” That would be when they were clubbing or riding around in a limo or playing gin in the back of the team plane. It only changed over time, subtle at first, gradual, Gary not really noticing it, Billy helping himself to as many girls as he ever did but worrying about it more as he got older, as he started to lose a step even as he still kept getting his points, worrying more and more about his sponsors, letting them run his goddamn life as though playing ball had become some kind of moonlighting deal with him, some kind of side thing, that all that really mattered to Billy Cash now was the money.
Now he just wanted to hold on to as much of that money as possible when Monica and her lawyers came after it, sure that Monica was secure enough in her own celebrity now, her own deal, to think she could stand alone as Mrs. Cash without him now.
Once she got her half, what people said could be close to half a billion.
It was why the last couple of years Gary’s main job had become organizing all the logistics of the girls, setting up this whole elaborate floor plan with the three rooms at every hotel they stayed at, it never occurring to Billy to slow down. He just thought he needed to be more damn careful.
The fool losing a step on the court, but obsessed with staying one step ahead of Mrs. Cash.
There was a reporter from that new ESPN magazine Billy Cash ran with sometimes, a sharp-dressed young guy about forty, shaved head, named Jayson Miles. Miles also did some on-air work for ESPN and managed to act like an insider without busting balls the way some of the other TV experts did. Over time, he had managed to get tight with the right stars in the league, especially the hip-hop do-rag kids with their hair and their tattoos, gaining their trust in a way most other guys couldn’t, white or black. It was Miles being on television that allowed him to lamp with the ballplayers the way he did, nobody gave a shit what he wrote in some magazine. By now, hanging with Billy Cash as long as he had, seeing Billy Cash’s world from the inside, Gary understood that the only ones in the media who had any status with players were the ones they knew from the TV. The only time some player cared about the newspapers was when one of his boys-and they all had their boys-told him some writer was trying to mess with him.
Gary had seen Jayson Miles a few times on one of those shows where they all sat around and argued about everything. And when it came down to it, and the others were yelling about how these kids made too much money and didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything except themselves, Jayson Miles, in his cool way, would find a way to stick up for the young stars of the league, say they weren’t all that different from basketball stars all across history, it was just that the fat white guy sitting there watching with his beer and his Cheez Doodles didn’t like all the graffiti up and down their arms, and their Sprewell hair. So Miles was officially on the inside now, dressing like a dude, talking the talk even if he had been to Stanford as an English major, moving through this world as easily as if he were the one knocking down the midrange Js.