She fell silent. At this point in their relationship Louis knew how to tap into her upper-middle-class guilt. They were nearly back to his apartment when she finally spoke again.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I know you work hard. I shouldn’t get upset.”
Bingo, he was thinking. Maybe the time was right after all. The feminist cause du jour had become pornography. Holly and her young, affluent friends were enthusiastically riding the anti-porn bandwagon. He would have to work with her recent musings against pornography and try to convince her that Nancy’s ex-husband was somehow connected to the movie Deep Throat; that she’d be doing her fellow sisters in feminism a solid by helping him rip John Albano off. Holly and her friends had recently spent an afternoon protesting in front of one of the porn theaters on Forty-second Street.
“It’s nothing I’m proud of,” he said. “Being another working slob, but it’s what I do and I have to make the best of it when there’s extra work.”
“You’re not a slob for working hard, Louis, don’t say that.”
It wouldn’t be easy getting her to go along with a robbery, but Louis had learned a long time ago the way to a woman’s heart was with compliments.
“I tell you how pretty you look today?”
“No, but thank you.”
“I tell you how much I missed you?”
“No, and I wouldn’t believe it because you were sleeping.”
He held up a finger. “Unless I was dreaming about you.”
“Sure,” she said. “Can we stop for some pop?”
“What?”
“Soda. Do you have any in the fridge?”
“Coke, I think. I’m not sure. I’ll go get some if I don’t. I need to get you to forgive me tonight.”
“If you’re looking for sex, it won’t be that easy.”
“I’m always looking for sex with you, honey.”
“When it’s convenient, it seems.”
“Come on, Holly,” Louis said. He matched her frown with one of his own, then said, “What if I had a proposition that involves acting?”
Holly made a face.
“I’m talking about helping the cause,” he continued. “Your cause against pornography.”
Holly seemed skeptical.
Louis turned onto the street where he lived and parked in front of the apartment building. Then he turned to Holly, took her hands in his and explained some of his game plan.
Nick Santorra was in a foul mood when he finally made it home. It had been a bad day that turned worse from the moment he left the house a few minutes after noon. First there was the speeding ticket he got on the Cross Island Parkway. Twenty minutes later he got another one on the Belt Parkway. Both tickets had come as a result of Nick’s new job chauffeuring Eddie Vento, who happened to be a skipper with the Vignieri crime family and his wife’s first cousin’s husband. Nick had joined Vento’s ranks with the hope of becoming a made man himself one day. After two years of performing gopher work for the mob and having to fork over most of what he earned on his own for the sake of a no-show truck driving job, Nick had finally moved up, the way he viewed the driving job.
Except so far it wasn’t all that glamorous, his new position. Today Nick had to pick up his boss’s dry cleaning and then chauffeur Vento’s wife back and forth to local stores. She was shopping for her daughter’s engagement party, something else that would cost Nick another fifty dollars in a couple of weeks.
Then he was stuck at the bar in Williamsburg doing the tally count for the fuck movie he was sick and tired of already. Even though it was the only chance he got to abuse somebody lower on the mob food chain, it was a lot of work counting all that money and having to deal with guys who would steal from their mothers.
After the tally count at the bar and after Vento held a private meeting in the basement with some Irish kid Nick didn’t like, he drove the drunken wiseguy to make a few pickups in Queens where he was stuck sitting in the car while mobsters exchanged cheek kisses and bear hugs ten feet away without ever acknowledging his existence. Then Vento insisted on stopping to see one of his girlfriends to get his pipes cleaned and that had taken almost an hour. Afterwards the wiseguy decided he wanted a piece of cheesecake at some diner in Queens and Nick was stuck being his company for that, too.
It was at the diner where the tension bubbled over and Nick lost it, first on a waitress and then with the cashier when a ten-cent charge wasn’t removed for a cup of coffee he never drank. Vento gave him shit for it later when they were in the parking lot, telling Nick he couldn’t curse like that in a room full of people because it made them look bad.
“What’s the matter with you?” Vento had told him. “First of all you don’t act like that in a public place. Second, you don’t talk like that to some broad unless she’s your girlfriend. You wanna act like a tough guy, save it for the street.”
Nick had been dumbfounded at the lecture. He’d been trying to impress Vento since he first went to work for him and was sure he’d started to make some headway when he was told he’d be the wiseguy’s new driver. Vento’s regular driver was serving a two-year sentence for assault. Nick had thought the move from flunky to personal driver was a big deal and had even taken his wife out to celebrate.
He’d since found out the road to becoming a made man was a lot bumpier than he’d originally thought. Being Eddie Vento’s personal driver wasn’t half as glamorous as Nick had imagined. All he’d done so far was pick up dry cleaning and make shopping runs. He’d become a glorified gopher subject to Eddie Vento’s vitriolic temper tantrums and the man could go from calm to insane in two seconds flat. When that happened, there was nothing Nick could say or do to avoid the berating he’d get for putting or not putting on a turn signal.
Nick found himself catching a lot more flack than he’d ever caught before and was starting to wonder if or when it would be worth it because he was still bringing home peanuts in salary for all the aggravation he was getting. He wondered if the driver he was replacing maybe had it better serving out the assault conviction up in Fishkill.
When he finally dropped the wiseguy off, it was close to one o’clock in the morning, but before Vento let Nick go, he had him haul six cartons out of his basement.
It was then the abuse and humiliation had been stretched an extra yard his ego didn’t have to spare; when Vento told him what was inside the cartons.
“Posters and panties,” the wiseguy had said.
Vento wanted them distributed where they were showing the fuck movie, Deep Throat. Nick resented it. He knew the big shots were making big money off the porn flick while guys like him were picking up crumbs for all their work.
“What you’re gonna do is take those home and have them signed, the panties and the posters,” Vento had said. “Sign them Linda Lovelace and have the guys running the movie sell them off as specialty items. Fi’ dollas for the panties and two for the posters. They keep a quarter on whatever they sell. We get the rest.”
“Panties?”
“Just make sure the same person signs them all the same way. Or the mopes might figure out they’re fugazy.”
Now, sitting at the dining room table, his hand cramping from signing poster after poster, Nick felt stupid.
Earlier he’d asked his wife to help, but Angela freaked out when she saw the posters were of Linda Lovelace and that the panties were supposed to be from the porno flick.
“That’s disgusting,” she had told Nick. “That woman should be in jail and so should you for selling that shit.”
Nick hadn’t had the energy to fight with her then. He let it go and started signing the posters instead. It was a time-consuming process during which he had to pull the plastic sleeve off each one, unroll it, then sign and re-roll it before slipping the sleeve back on.