“Do me a favor,” Davey said. “Lower your voice. Management has taken great pains to change the image of this place, and we don’t need your kind of trouble here. Really.”
Harry was close to slapping Davey Boy, but he held back. He was exhausted and he needed to sleep. Plus the Downtowner’s location was ideal, directly across the park from Julia’s co-op. So instead of saying any of the things he could’ve said to Davey Boy, in the end he just said, “I need a room with a toilet and a shower.”
“I got one,” Davey said, all proud. “Top floor.”
“How much is it gonna run me?”
“Five hundred for the week.”
Harry peeled five Franklins off his knot. “Is that all?” he said. “Haven’t you got something a bit more expensive?”
Davey handed him the key to room 801 and another key that would get him through the front door they locked after midnight. Harry headed toward the elevator, past the lights and the light stands and the photographer’s assistant and the photographer and the girls.
“Hey, Harry,” Davey Boy said when the elevator dinged, “don’t be sore.”
It was the sort of damp, grey morning New York was worth about six months of, drizzling off and on since before the sun came up. Bright green budlets shivered on skinny branches, as if they knew better than to come all the way out on this day that was sharp with the lingering doubt of winter.
The rain made everything stink.
Harry was across the street from the park, walking north on Avenue A and toward a clatch of punks huddled under the awning of a Syrian grocery. They wore clothes too dirty to use for rags, and they slept in condemned buildings for the realness of the experience, though most of them had warm, clean beds in some warm, clean suburb to go back to when the novelty wore off.
A voice burbled. “Spare a quarter so I can buy this fine gentleman a beer?” Trying to sound cute.
Harry locked eyes with a dusty bag of blood and bones who talked and presumably walked, though at the moment his ass was firmly planted on the concrete. For a guy who didn’t have the price of a drink, he was way over budget on jewelry. Silver studs punctured both nostrils and both lips. A chain of hoops lacerated each ear. His partner, the fine gentleman, was out cold on his back, feet flat, knees up. A spiderweb tattoo in indigo spread up from his neck and over his jaw.
Eyes shut against its circumstances, a mangy pit bull lay on the sidewalk and sighed, though Harry could see the dog wasn’t asleep. And they had a second mascot, a pale girl with creamy, teenaged skin. She’d had a bath during the last twenty-four hours, had slept indoors the night before, and was way too cute to be within a halfmile of these bums. She put the cadge on Harry, too, and he was about to let himself get touched, until he noticed her eyes were zipped a vacant, heroin blue.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t help you out.”
“Sorry?” the perforated dirtball said. “You’re not sorry.”
Harry had pulled even with where the kid was sitting, and thought for a second of kicking him in the teeth, just to see what all that metal would do to his face. See if he’d rather have that for an answer. But he didn’t do anything, and he didn’t say anything, and as a matter of fact, the kid had it right. He wasn’t sorry.
The apartment was up four flights of stairs, a two-bedroom Harry’s mom and pop nailed down in 1955. Including the last rent increase, it cost $197.63 a month. The current landlord got skunked with Harry’s old man and a few other tenants for life, but he maintained the property, anxious to keep the building attractive, and the turn-over on his one year-leases high.
Harry and his father hadn’t seen each other in over a year, but the most affection the old man could muster was a pat on the shoulder. He moved away from the door to let Harry inside.
“Son,” he said.
He looked good. He was wearing a pressed blue shirt and navy blue slacks that rode high on his waist and shimmered with a thousand dry cleanings. Harry wrapped his arms around him and pulled him close, the old man’s bones going stiff as Harry planted a kiss on his cheek. He broke the clinch, taking both of Harry’s biceps in his hands, and gently shoved him away. Giving him that same shoulder pat, he sat him at the table.
It was covered with a yellow oilcloth bright with blue gardenias, giving the room a hopeful, morning feel. A stack of placemats covered with the same pattern sat in the center of the table, under a plastic vase stuffed with plastic daisies, their plastic hearts a shade or two off the yellow of the cloth.
There wasn’t a single dish in the sink, not even a glass on the drain board. Harry said, “What’d you do, Pop, hire a maid?”
“I was just gonna brew up some java. Could you go for a cup of bean?”
“If you’re gonna make it, then I’ll drink it. But don’t go out of your way.” Harry was looking for an ashtray. He got up and opened the cupboard where they used to keep them, but there weren’t any there.
“If you’re gonna smoke,” his father said, “open that window and blow the smoke outside.” He leaned against the sink and stared at the gurgling Mister Coffee, scratching his wrist in a way that didn’t look like he had an itch.
“Forget it,” Harry said. “I can’t stay anyway.”
“I put it down, you know. Fifty-something years of the goddamn things, I finally gave ’em up.”
Harry said, “That’s real good, Pop. They don’t do a thing for you.”
“But you don’t realize how it’s ruining you till you quit. When you see how good you feel, you think, what the hell was I doing to myself all those years?”
He must’ve broken down and bought new glasses, retro-style, wire frame-numbers. If the old man had worn glasses in the ’50s, this would’ve been the pair. The lenses had a slight emerald tint. He brushed his hair straight back with a gel that knocked out the curl. There was plenty of white speckled into it, but it still hadn’t gone all the way grey, and neither had his fussily clipped mustache. Harry took this as a positive sign for his own prospects.
The old man took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, and the sugar bowl from a different shelf than it used to sit on when Harry lived here. The coffee was almost done brewing.
“So,” Harry said after a minute of awkward quiet, “you still gigging or what?”
“I sit in with this meringue band, but their dates are always way out in Brooklyn. I don’t know where I’m going when I get there, and then I gotta hang around till four in the morning to get paid. They work every weekend, but I don’t go with ’em every time. Depends on how I’m feeling. And I jam with these neighborhood kids.” He laughed. “Swing cats.”
“Swing?” Harry said. “Who plays swing?”
“Kids, I’m saying, younger than you. Standards and jump blues, like that Louie Jordan stuff. Very popular with a younger crowd. But it’s strictly for love, that gig. I go home some nights, twenty, thirty bucks.”
“You’re too pro to play for that kind of money. Don’t they know who you are, Pop?”
“You got that right. You know I gigged with Louie, dontcha?”
“Paramount Theatre, 1950.”
“Did I tell you the story?”
“Once or twice,” Harry said.
His father shrugged, disappointed, either because he couldn’t steamroll Harry with the details for the hundredth time, or because his memory was slipping and he honestly didn’t remember having told him.
He poured coffee into a pair of mugs. Then, from a cabinet under the sink, behind the cleanser and the Windex and the laundry soap, he pulled out a bottle of off-brand whiskey with the Irish flag on its label.
“Gotta be five o’clock somewhere in the world, right?” He spilled some booze into his mug, and was about to do the same to Harry’s when Harry stopped him.