Angela decided that she’d had it with Greek men. A couple of weeks later, she and her friend Laura went to Hogs amp; Heifers, a biker bar in the meatpacking district. They were having a blast, getting ripped on beer and shots of Schnapps, playing old Aerosmith on the jukebox. She’d had a thing for Steven Tyler years ago and still would’ve humped him in a heartbeat. Hell, the mood she was in, she would’ve humped any guy with money and decent breath. A few college girls, egged on by the surly bikers, stood on the bar during “Walk This Way” and started dancing topless. It was an informal ritual at the bar for girls to dance topless and the bikers started chanting for Laura and Angela to get up and join them. So Laura and Angela stood on the bar and did slow stripteases as the guys cheered them on. Laura stopped at her stockings, but Angela went all the way, pulling off her stockings and tossing them into the crowd of cheering men.
After dancing for about a half an hour, Angela got down from bar, suddenly exhausted and dizzy. A sweaty Puerto Rican guy came over, holding Angela’s stockings, and said, “Yo, I’m Tony. I think you dropped somethin’.”
Angela was drunk and everything else that happened that night was a blur. As she put on her stockings and bra and the rest of her clothes, Tony bought her a shot of tequila. Then he said, “I like the way you was dancin’ up there – you got all the moves. I like that accent too. You sound like that bitch from Braveheart.”
They started making out, touching each other all over, then Tony brought her back to his place in Spanish Harlem. She wound up spending the weekend.
It turned out Tony made good money, as a union plumber, and Angela thought, Sex, money, a big apartment – she had it made. Then, one night, they were hanging out, watching a DVD of 24 when Tony pressed pause and said, “Yo, I got a wife in San Juan.” Just like that, like it suddenly occurred to him.
Angela looked at him, said, “So you can divorce her, can’t you?”
“Naw, naw, it ain’t like that,” Tony said. “I got three kids too and they all comin’ over to live with me next week. Sorry ’bout that, yo.”
Angela couldn’t believe it. She’d spent all this time with this prick and let him do all that shit – tying her up, giving her a golden shower – then he says he has a fucking wife and kids! She literally became her mother, going at him like the very best of Irish women – clawing at his eyes, kneeing him in the balls, tearing out clumps of his hair. After she tore a bracelet off his hairy wrist, she took off and left him crying in front of the paused scene of Keifer Sutherland screaming at somebody. A couple of days later, Angela had the bracelet appraised. She expected it to be a fake and was stunned to discover it was white gold from Tiffany’s, worth a couple thousand bucks. It cost five dollars to have the clasp fixed and she wondered if maybe her luck was changing.
As it turned out, her luck was changing all right, but not necessarily for the better.
The first change was that Dillon arrived from Ireland and bought her a silver Claddagh ring and a bottle of Black Bushmills, “the cream of the barley,” he said. Dillon had that sly smile and those gross yet irresistible lips and said, “Mo croi, I’m stony.”
He had to translate, that she was “his very heart” and what girl could resist that shit? A few weeks later, after they decided to move in together, he said, “Trust me, allanna, and we’ll be in the clover.”
Then the second change came – she caught herpes. Dillon swore he didn’t have it, so she figured Spiros or Tony must’ve given it to her.
Then the third change: A job came to her out of nowhere. She’d applied for the position weeks ago and sick of would-be employers focusing on her shitty typing skills (she could only do twenty-four words a minutes with mistakes) and lack of experience (she’d never had an office job above receptionist), she decided, To hell with it, she’d get the job like she got men – with her body. She dressed for the interview in sheer black pantyhose, patent heels, and a killer short skirt.
Dillon, reading his Zen book, looked up at her, smiled, said, “That position for typing or fucking?”
She’d answered, “Either way, I’m good to go.”
Her appointment with Max Fisher, CEO of NetWorld, was for two o’clock and Angela arrived at the office half an hour early. The receptionist kept her waiting on the couch in the lobby for over an hour, and Angela got so pissed off she was about to leave. Then Max came into the lobby. Angela watched his gaze shift from her face down to her legs, then slowly back up again. When his eyes fixated on her bust, she thought, Gotcha.
She had.
During the interview, Max continued to eye her with his jaw hanging partly open. Angela thought Max was probably the most disgusting and pathetic guy she’d ever met. He was like some overgrown thirteen year old, with that picture of the blonde on the Porsche on the wall and the way he kept staring at her tits, with the tip of his tongue showing between his teeth. Angela said to herself, There’s no way in hell I’m working for this loser. Then Max offered her a salary of sixty-four thousand a year plus full health benefits and three weeks vacation.
On her first day, Angela could tell that Max was seriously into her. It was more than just staring at her all the time and flirting. A couple of times when they were alone in his office he put his hand on her leg and one time he said he had knots in his shoulders and asked her to give him a massage. She figured, What the hell? The man had money, money she wouldn’t get by blowing him off. Also, she liked the attention. Dillon hadn’t been around very much lately. He was always staying out late, saying, I need to hook up with the boyos. The boyos meant the guys from the Ra, Dillon’s name for the IRA.
But after only a few weeks, Max started to disgust her again. She couldn’t stand his old, flabby body, and she hated the way he never stopped complaining. If he wasn’t talking about his wife, saying things like how he was “ready to trade her in for a newer model,” then he was whining about his heart or some other medical problem. And what was with all that crap music? One day he’d told her he’d teach her to appreciate “the nuances of the composers.” She’d had to look up nuances in the dictionary, then realized how full of shit he was.
Max was like somebody’s grandfather. She didn’t know why she’d ever gotten involved with him. After taxes, sixty-four thousand dollars wasn’t as much as she’d thought it would be. Max had bucks, she knew that, but he was a real tightwad. Yeah, he had the townhouse and the Porsche, but he never took trips or bought nice clothes. And when it came to tips he had deep pockets, but short arms. If she was going to see any serious amount of money out of the relationship, it wasn’t going to be by just sleeping with him.
Meanwhile, Dillon still hadn’t gotten her an engagement ring or talked about setting a wedding date. One night, Angela brought it up while they were lying in bed in the dark and Dillon said, “Mo croi, I gave you a Claddagh ring, that’s as married as it gets. We get some green together, I’ll bring you down to Vegas, do a Britney special, okay?”
Angela didn’t want a fancy wedding. She just wanted to go to City Hall, maybe invite her father, her friend Laura and a couple of cousins and that’s it. But Dillon wouldn’t hear of it till they were, as he always said, “loaded.”
He said it low-dead and she wondered for the hundredth time, was he fucking with her mind? She was Irish, and she knew how that worked. They did it just because they could, it was the national pastime. It explained the national sport, hurling, that cross between hockey and murder, played with no helmets unless you were, like, “a fag” or something. Talk about head-fucking.
To get revenge, Angela went with Max for a weekend to Barbados, telling Dillon she was going to Greece for an aunt’s funeral. She came back more confused than ever. She didn’t like Max any better, but she was still pissed off at Dillon. She wanted things to work out with him, but she knew they never would, because of money. He was always talking about how he wanted to have expensive cars and to live on the beach and not have to worry about working.