I get up out of my chair — he doesn’t care if I sit when nobody’s in the store — and tuck in my uniform. Every so often I like to stretch my legs with a stroll around the showroom. The old man keeps the display cases looking nice, dusts the rings and bracelets and watches every day, wipes down the glass. I test him now and then by leaving a thumbprint somewhere, and it’s always gone the next morning.
Another game I play to pass the time, I’ll watch the people walking by outside and bet myself whether the next one’ll be black or Mexican, a man or a woman, wearing a hat or not, things like that. Or I’ll lean my chair back as far as it’ll go, see how long I can balance on the rear legs. The old man doesn’t like that one, always yells, “Stop fidgeting. You make me nervous.” And I’ve also learned to kind of sleep with my eyes open and my head up, half in this world, half in the other.
I walk over to the door and look outside. It’s a hot day, and folks are keeping to the shade where they can. Some are waiting for a bus across the street, in front of the music store that blasts that oom pah pah oom pah pah all day long. Next to that’s a McDonald’s, then a bridal shop, then a big jewelry store with signs in the windows saying Compramos Oro, We Buy Gold.
A kid ducks into our doorway to get out of the sun. He’s yelling into his phone in Spanish and doesn’t see me standing on the other side of the glass, close enough I can count the pimples on his chin.
“¿Por qué?” he says. That’s “Why?” or sometimes “Because.” “¿Por qué? ¿Por qué?”
When he feels my eyes on him, he flinches, startled. I chuckle as he moves out to the curb. He glances over his shoulder a couple times like I’m something he’s still not sure of.
“Is it too cold in here?” the old man shouts.
He’s short already, but hunched over like he is these days, he’s practically a midget. Got about ten hairs left on his head, all white, ears as big as a goddamn monkey’s, and those kind of thick glasses that make your eyes look like they belong to someone else.
“You want me to dial it down?” I say.
“What about you? Are you cold?” he says.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say.
Irving Mandelbaum. I call him Mr. M or boss. He’s taken to using a cane lately, if he’s going any distance, and I had to call 911 a while back when I found him facedown on the office floor. It was just a fainting spell, but I still worry.
“Five degrees, then,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”
I adjust the thermostat and return to my chair. When I’m sure Mr. M is in the office, I rock back and get myself balanced. My world record is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
I’ve been living in the hotel awhile now. Before that it was someplace worse, over on Fifth. Someplace where you had crackheads and hypes puking in the hallways and OD’ing in the bathrooms we shared. Someplace where you had women knocking on your door at all hours, asking could they suck your dick for five dollars. It was barely better than being on the street, which is where I ended up after my release from Lancaster. Hell, it was barely better than Lancaster.
A Mexican died in the room next to mine while I was living there. I was the one who found him, and how I figured it out was the smell. I was doing janitorial work in those days, getting home at dawn and sleeping all morning, or trying to, anyway. At first the odor was just a tickle in my nostrils, but then I started to taste something in the air that made me gag if I breathed too deeply. I didn’t think anything of it because it was the middle of summer and there was no air-conditioning and half the time the showers were broken. To put it plainly, everybody stunk in that place. I went out and bought a couple of rose-scented deodorizers and set them next to my bed.
A couple of days later I was walking to my room when something strange on the floor in front of 316 caught my eye. I bent down for a closer look and one second later almost fell over trying to get up again. What it was was three fat maggots, all swole up like overcooked rice. I got back down on my hands and knees and pressed my cheek to the floor to see under the door, and more maggots wriggled on the carpet inside the room, dancing around the dead man they’d sprung from.
Nobody would tell me how the guy died, but they said it was so hot in the room during the time he lay in there that he exploded. It took a special crew in white coveralls and rebreathers almost a week to clean up the mess, and even then the smell never quite went away. It was one of the happiest days of my life when I moved from there.
J Bone’s cousin, the player from the lobby, is laughing at me. I’m not trying to be funny, but the man is high, so everything makes him laugh. His name is Leon.
It’s 6:30 in the evening outside. In here, with tinfoil covering the windows, it might as well be midnight. I suspect time isn’t the main thing on the minds of Leon and Bone and the two girls passing a blunt on the bed. They’ve been at it for hours already and seem to be planning on keeping the party going way past what’s wise.
The door to Bone’s room was wide open when I walked by after work, still wearing my uniform. I heard music playing, saw people sitting around.
“Who that, McGruff the Crime Dog?” Leon called out.
Some places it’s okay to keep going when you hear something like that. Not here. Here, if you give a man an inch on you, he’ll most definitely take a mile. So I went back.
“What was that?” I said, serious but smiling, not weighting it one way or the other.
“Naw, man, naw,” Leon said. “I’s just fucking with you. Come on in and have a beer.”
All I wanted was to get home and watch Jeopardy!, but I couldn’t say no now, now that Leon had backed down. I had to have at least one drink. One of the girls handed me a Natural Light, and Leon joked that I better not let anybody see me with it while I was in uniform.
“That’s cops, man, not guards,” I said, and that’s what got him laughing.
“You know what, though,” he says. “Most cops be getting high as motherfuckers.”
Everybody nods and murmurs, “That’s right, that’s right.”
“I mean, who got the best dope?” he continues. “Cops’ girlfriends, right?”
He’s wearing the same suit he had on the other day, the shirt unbuttoned and the jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He’s got the gift of always looking more relaxed than any man has a right to, and that relaxes other people. And then he strikes.
“So what you guarding?” he asks me.
“A little jewelry store on Hill,” I say.
“You got a gun?” he says.
“Don’t need one,” I say. “It’s pretty quiet.”
I don’t tell him I’m not allowed to carry because of my record. We aren’t friends yet. Some of these youngsters, first thing out of their mouths is their crimes and their times. They’ve got no shame at all.
“What you gonna do if some motherfucker comes in waving a gat, wanting to take the place down?” Leon says.
I sip my beer and shrug. “Ain’t my store,” I say. “I’ll be ducking and covering.”
“Listen at him,” Leon hoots. “Ducking and covering. My man be ducking and covering.”
The smoke hanging in the air is starting to get to me. The music pulses in my fingertips, and my grin turns goofy. I’m looking right at the girls now, not even trying to be sly about it. The little one’s titty is about to fall out of her blouse.
Leon’s voice comes to me from a long way off. “I like you, man,” he says. “You all right.”
Satan’s a sweet talker. I shake the fog from my head and down the rest of my beer. If you’re a weak man, you better at least be smart enough to know when to walk away. I thank them for the drink, then hurry to my room. With the TV up loud, I can’t hear the music, and pretty soon it gets back to being just like any other night.