“Just get the hell outta here!”
“You don’t want your towels?”
“Get out, you fucking moron!”
“What about your soap?”
“Leave!”
“Please, Mister,” Bobby said, wheeling back toward the door. “Don’t get me fired. I need this job. I need it real bad.” He took a last look at the blonde, who’d pulled the sheet up around her tits and turned her back to him. “I’m real sorry about bustin’ in on you, I didn’t see nothing…” He scooted out the door and let it shut behind him.
Riding the elevator down, camera tucked in his bag, Bobby was smiling, proud of his performance. He was better than fuckin’ Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Maybe he should’ve listened to Isabella, gone on some auditions. Maybe it wasn’t too late. There had to be roles for guys in wheelchairs, right?
Nah, he decided, acting was too fucking boring. He needed the buzz, the action. Crime was where it was at.
As he wheeled out into the lobby, he started thinking about Mrs. Brown.
She was a good-looking girl all right. She had to be a pro – why else would a girl like that spread her legs for some middle-aged bald guy looked like that?
In the lobby, Bobby met Victor near the Thirty-second Street exit, said, “So far, so good.”
“Yeah, sure” Victor said, all panicked, like he didn’t believe it for a second. “What the fuck happened?”
“Stop shitting your pants, will ya?” Bobby said. “I got some good pics. Now we just gotta get the payola.”
Bobby took the Eighth Avenue bus uptown. When he got back to his apartment, he developed the film as fast as he could. Two of the shots had come out blurry and one had the towel in the way, but two were clear as fucking day. In the one he was going to use, you could see Mr. Brown with his mouth open, staring at the camera, while Mrs. Brown was just starting to cover those big knockers of hers. Bobby thought for a moment, trying to come up with a good name, then on the back of the picture he wrote a note telling Mr. Brown to leave ten thousand dollars at the hotel’s front desk for “Tommy Lee.” He stuck the photo inside a manila envelope and sealed it.
When he arrived back at the hotel, Victor said, “I got some bad news for you. The guy and the girl – they both took off.”
“Fuck, when?”
“Half hour after you left. Why don’t you keep your fuckin’ phone on? Goddamn phones – everybody’s got ’em, but nobody’s got ’em turned on.”
“I thought you said they were staying the night?”
“That’s what they told the girl at the desk, but that doesn’t mean they’re gonna do it. It’s not like they’re obligated to.”
“Shit.”
“And that’s not all – the cops were here.”
“The cops?”
“There an echo in here?”
Wanting to smack Victor, Bobby said, “What the hell’d the cops want?”
“Got me. When I first found out I thought, That’s it – I’m fired. F ‘n’ F. Fired and fucked.”
Now Bobby remembered seeing a big black guy in a gray suit in the lobby earlier in the night, thinking the guy had a cop look to him. Bobby had always had great cop-dar.
“Was he asking about us?” Bobby asked.
“No, that’s just it,” Victor said. “It was the couple. He was asking all kinds of questions about them. Who are they, have they been here before, what’s the girl’s name – shit like that.”
“The girl? Not the guy?”
“That’s all I know,” Victor said. “Then when the girl left the cop followed her. Look, Bobby. I mean I like working with you again and everything, but we can’t do this shit no more. Now with the cops coming down here, this is getting crazy. I can’t lose this job, Bobby. It has nothing to do with you – I just can’t lose this fucking job, I’ve too much riding on my paycheck.”
Bobby, starting to wheel away, said, “The whole thing was a dumb idea anyway. Forget about it.”
“Hey, come on,” Victor said. “Don’t be like that. Wait up a second.”
During the bus ride home, Bobby was thinking about the cop, wondering why he was asking questions about the girl. He also wondered why Mr. Brown arrived at the hotel wearing that blond wig. Then he thought, What the fuck difference did it make? Even if the guy had paid the money it wouldn’t’ve changed anything. Right now Bobby had enough money. He owned his apartment outright and had some savings safe with loan sharks. What would an extra ten grand do for him? It wouldn’t get him outta the goddamn chair, wouldn’t let him get up and walk to the deli or whatever. He wasn’t doing this for the money. The money was, like, a bonus. Just to show he wasn’t completely fucking useless.
A few months after he was paralyzed a vocational counselor at Mount Sinai Hospital asked Bobby if he was planning to return to work and Bobby said, “Hell yeah.”
The woman went on about the different services available to him, how he could learn how to use a computer and maybe get some bullshit office job, and Bobby said, “I don’t wanna do that kind of work – I wanna do my work. Can you guys help me do that?”
“And what kind of work do you do, Mr. Rosa?” she’d asked.
Bobby had mumbled something like, Never mind, and hightailed it the fuck out of there.
Bobby was lost in thought and suddenly realized that the bus was passing the Eighty-ninth Street stop. He started screaming at the driver, “Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you, asshole! Didn’t you hear me ring the goddamn bell? Jesus Christ, what the fuck does a guy gotta do to get off a fucking bus these days?” If he’d been packing, he might have shot the fuck.
Bobby continued to curse as the driver lowered him on the wheelchair lift. He heard the driver shout after him, “You’re welcome.”
Yeah, Bobby would have shot him.
When he got home, Bobby tried to relax on a tub chair in the shower. Then he flipped around on the TV awhile, but nothing was on. He ate a couple packages of Cup-a-Soup and then hit the sack.
The next day Bobby took a bus uptown to visit his mother at the Jewish Home for the Aged, a nursing home on 106th Street. He’d moved his mother up there last year, from a nursing home in Brooklyn, because it was only seventeen blocks from his apartment and he wanted to visit her more often.
For a while, he went every day, bringing her ice cream and Chinese food and getting one of the orderlies to wheel her out to the garden so she could get some fresh air. But then his mother had another stroke, a bad one, and now she just slept most of the time. Bobby still visited her three or four times a week; he would’ve gone more often, but it was too depressing to see her so out of it. He was afraid that when her time came and she died that was how he’d remember her – with her eyes closed and her toothless mouth sagging open.
As usual, his mother was in bed asleep. Her body had shriveled, especially on her left side. She’d always been short, but under the blanket she looked like she was four feet tall. There were tubes connected to her arms, meaning she probably had another infection. Bobby was gonna raise hell, find out why nobody called to tell him, but he knew this wouldn’t do any good. It would just get him all worked up and his mother would still be lying in bed like a vegetable. Sometimes Bobby thought his mother would be better off dead and he even thought about taking her home and shooting her.
More and more, he just wanted to shoot somebody, go postal, let them know how goddamn angry he was.
He might’ve done it too, offed his Mom, except she was Catholic and he knew she wouldn’t want that. She was probably already pissed off at him for putting her in a Jewish nursing home. But, hey, she was past complaining.
Bobby shook his mother’s arm until her eyes opened. She couldn’t smile anymore, but Bobby could always tell she was happy to see him. The dribble from the corner of her mouth could be a sign of happiness, he figured. Like she was trying to smile.
After sitting next to her for a while, Bobby took the elevator down to the cafeteria and bought a little container of ice cream. Then he went back up to his mother’s room and shook her awake. She turned toward him, but this time only one of her eyes opened.