“You said there was trouble?”
“One Friday he thought they said thirty when they actually said thirteen. Froze the wrong ball. It got ugly. They had stacked their bets, and a fortune was lost. They decided to ice him.”
“They shot him?”
“No, they stuck him in an icehouse. One thing about Cubans — we love our irony.”
“Froze to death,” said Lenny, nodding. “I hear it’s like going to sleep.”
“What about you?” asked Serge. “Any interesting background?”
“Not really,” said Lenny. “Born in Pahokee. Family never kept up with their roots, so I didn’t hear much. Did a little bit here and there. Worked in an airline parts depot in Opa-Locka because I got to fly around the country for free. I’m a Jets fan but the games aren’t broadcast here, so I’d fly up to La Guardia or Newark every Sunday to watch them in the airport lounge and fly right back after the game. Then one Wednesday I’m at the airport here. I’m driving the parts van on the edge of the runway and I hear yelling. ‘Stop him! Stop him!’ I see some guy in a silk shirt and gold chains running from a Cessna being chased by a Jack Webb type. So I blocked him off with my van at the corner of a building. The guy reaches in his pants. I think he’s going to blow me away, but he pulls out a kilo bag and throws it at my window and it explodes in this white cloud and I can’t see anything. The federal agent tackles the guy from behind and his face comes through the cloud and smashes up against my window, a big blood streak where his nose hit the glass and dragged down. The agent cuffs him and starts yelling his head off, punching the guy in the liver: ‘Don’t… you… ever… make… me… run!…’ They haul the guy off and he’s shouting that he’ll come back and get me, and the other employees said I should leave town, so I head to Broward and get a job cleaning the inside of cop cars because of all the drugs you find where handcuffed suspects stuff them in the backseat crack. I moved again when my dad died and the will gave me a little condo they used to rent out in Kendall. I was up visiting some friends in Georgia one weekend, and I’m coming home at sunset on a Sunday and the other side of I-95 is jammed with cars heading north, barely moving. But there’s absolutely nobody on my side of the highway. I mean nobody. I must have driven a hundred miles without seeing another car. And the people crawling along in the northbound lanes are pointing at me. I’m thinking, That’s odd. Is there something going on I don’t know about? But I dismiss it and keep going. I get to my neighborhood and it’s ghost town. Even the twenty-four-hour convenience stores are closed, plywood on the windows. Now I’m thinking, Okay, something’s definitely up. I turn on the TV, and they’re talking about this Hurricane Andrew. I try to find some sports or cartoons, but every channel is the hurricane. So I figure screw it — I’ll go work on my car. Which is real drudgery unless you’re high, so I’m out there at midnight laying on the ground, blowing a fat one and draining my oil pan, and the wind starts to pick up and I begin getting this sideways rain under the car, really hard, stinging like hundreds of little pins. But I’m thinking it’s just really good dope. A fence picket tears loose and hits the car, then something else breaks the passenger window. I finally put two and two together — can this Hurricane Andrew be what all the hoopla’s about? I make a mental note to start reading the papers. I head to the house, but there’s no power and my sliding glass doors have buckled, but luckily I’ve got two twelve-packs in the fridge. So I sit down and start drinking. But after a while it’s not fun anymore. With the sliding doors down, there’s way too much wind in the room, and everything’s flying around and hitting me. I start to take a real beating. My beer can collection, CDs, Playboy videos. I’m getting my butt kicked by my own shit. I don’t need it. I say, Fuck this, and I go out in the stairwell. It is one of those sturdy concrete jobs with a padlocked storage area underneath for bicycles and lawn mowers. I crawl in there with the rest of my beer and a radio and a candle. I’m not sure exactly when I passed out, but the next morning the only thing left standing was that stairwell. The insurance company paid for everything, and I spent the money on a six-month kick-ass cocaine party. I’ve never had so many friends. Then I was living in my car for a while. I got like a million parking tickets, and I was towed once while passed out in the backseat. They must not have noticed me. I woke up, climbed over into the front and drove out of the towing yard when they opened the gate for one of the trucks. Did you know you can get all your parking tickets canceled just by mailing in your death certificate? Doesn’t matter how many you have — they erase every one. But after I died three times, they got really upset. So I had to leave town again….”
Serge was staring with his mouth open.
“Serge?”
“What?”
“Why are we here?”
“That’s an awfully big question, Lenny. I guess if you believe in God, it’s a little easier. If not, you might have to go with the unified field theory.”
“No, I mean, why are we here right now? Why did we come to this place? I forget.”
“We came here to…” Serge stopped. “Why did we come here?”
Serge and Lenny looked at each other, then at the ground, then back at each other, scratching their heads, looking off in the distance, across the concourse, where two men walked toward the exit with a silver briefcase.
Serge and Lenny looked at each other: “The briefcase!”
They jumped up and took off after the men, rounding the corner of the building and sprinting through the Rocket Garden, giant silver and white tubes towering skyward all around.
“That’s an Atlas. Had a sixty percent fail ratio before John Glenn climbed in. This is the suborbital Redstone that took up Shepard and Grissom…” — Serge breathing hard, not breaking stride — “…and the big one is the incredible Gemini Titan, an ICBM converted for human flight. Pulled some serious Gs off the pad…”
They made it to the car and patched out. Serge grabbed the tracking device. “It’s working again! Must be because we’ve left the complex!”
Serge was driving now, pushing the Cadillac across the causeway, accelerating as they rounded A1A by Port Canaveral. “Take the wheel.”
“Man, I’m way too fucked up to drive, especially from the passenger side.”
But Serge had already let go and was pointing the tracking device out the side of the car. Lenny began steering with his left hand.
The tracking signal grew stronger. Serge aimed it at each passing building. “…There’s the Durango steak house, formerly the Mousetrap. Legendary astronaut hangout. If those walls could talk…. And there’s the Econo Lodge, which used to be the Cape Colony Inn owned by the Mercury Seven. There’s still a little commemorative sign out back by the oriental restaurant….”
“Who’s your favorite astronaut?” asked Lenny.
“I’d have to give the edge to Frank Borman or John Young. What about you?”
“Major Healy.”
“Ah yes, the master thespian from I Dream of Jeannie, a very strange TV show,” said Serge. “The one that always made me wonder was The Flying Nun. Think about it. There was actually a prime-time show on a major network about a nun whose hat made her fly.”
“They did a lot of drugs back then,” said Lenny.
“That might explain the Sid and Marty Croft stuff, but this idea was brain-dead on arrival. I would have loved to have sat in on that pathetic pitch meeting. I mean, what the fuck were they rejecting? The wacky yet sexually frustrating escapades of the disembodied-head-in-a-jar sharing an apartment with three voluptuous flight attendants?”