“You talkin’ bout those ‘bolos’ of his,” said the young Negro.
“Yeah,” said Nick. “That.”
“Don’t matter no how anyway. The winner of this one’s gotta go up against Sugar Ray. And you know what’s gon’ happen then.”
“Hey, Costa,” said the Negro with all the records, gently elbowing the man next to him. “Who you think’s gonna do it tonight? The Cuban or the colored?”
“Cuban, hell,” said Costa. “You call him what you want, they both look plenty colored to me, goddamn.”
The men at the counter laughed.
Costa walked hurriedly over to Florek, nodded at his cup. “You ready for a refill?”
“No thanks, I’m okay.”
“Refill’s free.”
“I’m just gonna have one tonight, thanks.”
“Refill’s free.”
“I gotta get on my way.”
“Hokay, boss. Suit yourself.”
“Ribs up!” said the voice behind the door.
Costa spun on his heels, pushed in on the swinging doors, motored back to the kitchen. Florek heard Costa’s voice then, speaking to the cook excitedly in that strange, jumbled language.
“How much I owe you?” said Florek to Nick.
“Nickel.”
Florek put it on the counter. “Thanks.”
“Coffee okay?”
“Yeah, fine. I’d stay for another, but I gotta get off to work.”
“Yeah? Where you work?”
“People’s, downtown.”
“Doin’ what?”
“Soda jerk.”
“Uh,” said Nick.
“I’ll be back. I only live two doors down.”
“In those rooms Mrs. Roberts keeps?”
“Yeah, those.”
The large man in the apron put out his hand. “Nick Stefanos. That’s my name on the sign out front.”
Florek shook Stefanos’s hand. “Mike Florek.”
“Florek. What kinda name’s that?”
“Polish.”
“Me, I’m Greek.” Stefanos smiled. “Hokay, boy. You come back soon, hokay?”
“Sure. I’ll see you around.”
Costa came bursting through the doors, running the ribs to the man who had ordered them. He put the plate down with a flourish, slid a bottle of hot sauce next to the plate. The man with the records held one out to Costa, who took it and placed it on the phonograph’s platter. Florek walked across the wood floor. The young Negro, who was dressed stylishly in a suit and tie and velvet-banded hat, gave him a quick glance and a tight nod as he passed. Florek went by the bouncer named Six, heard the rolling piano intro to the song as the new record began to spin. A guy could really tap his foot to a record like that.
Florek pushed on the door, zipped his mackinaw up to the neck as he hit the sidewalk. He found himself smiling as he walked south. He was plenty glad he had stepped into Nick’s.
Florek had hit town in late November. He phoned his mother first off to let her know he had arrived, then went straight to the YMCA where he found a cot and place to wash his face. His first night was virtually sleepless, as he felt the need to protect his hundred dollars from the vagrants, drunks, and drifters with whom he shared the space. He spent the first couple of days looking for a room of his own; he needed work right away, and he knew he’d have difficulty getting it without a local address.
An ad in the Times-Herald pointed him in the direction of 14th Street in the northwest quadrant of the city, where an elderly, straight-backed lady named Mrs. Roberts showed him a room on the third floor of a row house between R and S. The room was comfortably furnished, had steam heat, and a large picture window that faced east on 14th and caught a great block of morning sun. The promise of the sun blowing through the window each morning, along with the reasonable asking rate of five dollars a week, closed the deal for Florek. He assured Mrs. Roberts that he was both a sober and quiet young man. Her eyes betrayed her doubt — Mrs. Roberts suspected all young men, by design, of bad intent — but she took his ten dollars representing two weeks’ rent.
Florek sought work immediately through the Restaurant Association, whose Northeast offices he walked to on his third day in town. He filled out some paperwork there and spent the rest of the week waiting to hear from them and exploring the city. It was an easy city to get to know. The trolley lines and Capital Transit buses were logically routed, and the streets — numbered north to south, alphabetized east to west — could not have been more plainly laid out for the first-time user. Of the streets themselves, he found a kind of open beauty in their width and clean lines. He did find it difficult deciding on which of these streets to avoid; unlike New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s South Side, there seemed to be no clear boundaries separating white D.C. from its Darktown. Often he would pass through residential neighborhoods housing Negroes, then whites, then Negroes again on alternating blocks without landmarks of any kind. But after a while he grew used to this, too, and at no time during the day, walking on those streets, did he feel unsafe. He did, however, feel the weight of loneliness pushing down on him as the days fell away; in that first week alone, he phoned his mother three times.
In early December, Mike Florek answered an ad in the Evening Star for counter help at a place called People’s Drug. The Restaurant Association had not contacted him, and his money had begun to run low. He thought he might have a shot at such a position, what with his experience at the California Confectionery back home. The next morning he went to the employment office at 77 P Street in Northeast, filled out an application, and was interviewed on the spot. The interview did not go well to start, as Florek was not one to shine at first meeting, but then the man behind the desk, a Pole named Mr. Grieszefski, caught Florek’s address of origin on the application, and broke into a smile. It seemed Grieszefski had an uncle on his mother’s side by the name of Daniel Florek, who lived in western Pennsylvania near the Shenango Valley. Was he a relative of Mike’s? Mike nodded with bright eyes and said that he was. In the big city it felt somehow natural to tell lies.
That evening, Florek started his new job as a soda jerk at People’s on 15th and H. The shift went seven till midnight, the pay seventy-five cents an hour for twenty hours’ worth of work per week. The pay was fair, and a meal came with it, and he figured he could sneak more food into his stomach on top of that. As for the job itself, he knew he could do the work in his sleep. A cherry Coke was a cherry Coke, wherever you were raised.
Florek thought, too, that he might make some friends at this new job. But his shift boss turned out to be a pale, middle-aged Baptist from the southeast part of the city named Mr. Simms, who seemed to frown on anything that smacked of fun, and the two of them clashed from the start. Florek did his job, though, took the constant negative comments and swipes quietly, and continued to report for work promptly at seven each evening. The pay kept him solvent, and even the company of Simms was preferable to the hand-wringing solitude he faced in his room late at night. Florek still phoned his mother three times each week, though he had nothing to report.
So far, he had made only one weak effort to find Lola. One night, after a month in D.C., Florek had gotten the nerve to pass by Thomas Circle on his walk home from work. Thomas was a safe bet to start, as even tourists and conventioneers knew the Circle as the city’s major open-air market for prostitutes. Typically, Florek chose to approach the meekest-looking of the whores, a tiny girl still in her teens with a blond pageboy haircut who wrapped herself coyly in a fake sealskin coat. He assured her that he only wanted to talk; she replied that the price would be the same, talk or not. In the unheated hallway of a nearby flophouse, he showed her the photograph of Lola. The girl drew on her cigarette as she studied the picture with the passive interest of a woman glancing at her nails.