“Boy,” I told the guy sitting in the window seat when the hostess brought our lunch, “if I had a nickel for every tattoo.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Well,” I said, “I’d be a lot richer.”
“What about it?”
“And maybe I wouldn’t itch so much. Yours don’t itch?”
But I was wrong to be afraid of them.
Though the plane had landed just after five, it was almost seven in the evening by the time I checked into the Travelodge. Anchorage wasn’t much, not the city it is today, but the airport was a sort of no-frills O’Hare, booming, busy, unadorned as a discount department store and everywhere still under construction. Getting a cab was murder. Or rather getting out of the airport’s two narrow, crowded lanes and into open traffic was. Virtually every four-wheeled vehicle in town had been pressed into service as a taxi. (I had to share a ride into downtown Anchorage with a fellow in some guy’s metered wrecker, my two suitcases stuffed into the back with his duffel bag by the pulleys and chains, the big iron hook heavy as an anchor.) It was a kind of Marne, some Dunkirk of heroic gridlock.
I tried to call Shelley, couldn’t get through to the desk, went, in my robe and pajamas, out to the lobby to a pay phone I’d seen when I checked in, but the line, which in the tiny motel lobby looked more like a milling mob — or even the deadlocked traffic in the streets — than anything as procedural as a line, was too much to deal with and I started back to my room.
“What’s your name, honey?” a man asked who saw me in my bathrobe.
“Leave it alone, Spike,” another man told him. “You forget it’s Alaska? You ain’t never heard of the high cost of living? Wait till you put some of that pipeline graft into your pockets before you try to make out with the hookers.”
“Ah, shit,” the first man said, “what’s money for?”
It was already after nine o’clock and too late to try to call Shelley in New Jersey. There was no room-service menu, the desk was still busy, and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to get a table in the dining room, so I ate only what I was able to choose from the candy and soft-drink machines and went to bed with a sort of false satiety. This combined with the strange racket I heard in the streets — sounds of traffic, punches, the raucous camaraderie of drunks — and reminded me again of the Marne and Dunkirk impressions I’d had earlier. It really was like wartime. Like being in some sleazy R&R town away from the fighting. Also, there’d been that ribbing I’d taken in the lobby. It had been good-humored enough, but that’s not why I was wrong to be afraid of them. Some were just kids — it was the beginning of the post-hippie era — intent on an adventure, out to pick up a trade, earn a few bucks and smoke some good dope under the aurora borealis, but that’s not why I was wrong to be afraid of them either.
In the coffee shop the next morning it gave me a kick to see reindeer steak on the menu and I seriously considered having some with my eggs, but then I thought, Putz, you’re in Anchorage, a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, maybe two thousand from the North Pole. It wouldn’t be fresh. And I laughed out loud, the joke being that it was on there strictly for the tourists, a tourist item, like all the Wisconsin cheese they tried to sell you as soon you crossed the state line from Illinois when I was a kid, or pecans the minute you hit Georgia, or Key lime pie as soon as you put your toe in Florida. And the cans of beer for two bucks a pop that they dispensed from the vending machines outside my room and from which I’d bought my dinner last night, the pony bottles of booze at five dollars apiece, and even the outrageous prices themselves, that was tourist stuff, too, local color, and it was actually reassuring, in the sense that I was on familiar ground, to realize that Anchorage was a tourist trap. It cheers you to get the lowdown on a place. It cheers you to be able to shift into the rabbi mode in unfamiliar parts of the world. But neither is that why I was wrong to be afraid of them.
After breakfast I went back into the lobby to phone Shelley and tell her I was all right. There was a line but nothing like the night before and, when I put my call through, I sat down to wait for the cab I’d called after I’d told Shelley good-bye. The guy who’d kibitzed me about my robe was there, though he didn’t recognize or even notice me. And some kick-ass, shtarker types I’d seen on the flight coming in. They wore T-shirts and blue jeans, most of them, and looked in their colorless, climateless clothes rather like sailors. They were speaking a sort of quiet shop-talk that I suddenly, even unexpectedly, recognized as conversation and, without understanding why, I was moved and had to lift my handkerchief to my eyes to conceal the fact that they’d filled with tears. Maybe it had something to do with their jargon. As a rabbi, I’m a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferances and lenities — all their official, documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters’ knacks, the oilers’ and operators’ known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.
Was there a broche for laborers?
God spare these men, I prayed. Protect them from frostbite and snow blindness, don’t let them fall through holes in the ice and keep their feet from stumbling into treacherous crevasses.
And where did I get off, I wondered, praying such prayers instead of pouring it on like any ordinary Jew with his customary mash notes and love letters?
“Uh-oh,” said this guy from the night before, the one who’d reminded his pal about the cost of living in Alaska, “ain’t that a company bus just pulled into the drive?”
“Big yellow mother?”
“I’d fucking say so.”
“Who’s the asshole coming off?”
“Honcho holding on to his faggot briefcase like a schoolgirl?”
“Cocksucker with the mincy-ass wiggle-waggle?”
“Guy looks like he’s walking on his pinkie fingers?”
“Oooh, he thinks he’s gorgeous. Doesn’t he think he’s gorgeous?”
“Spike thinks anyone in a suit and tie is gorgeous.”
Spike smashed his left fist into his right palm. “Guy dressed like that is just asking for it. Like handing out an engraved invitation to the old bunghole investigation. This is what I believe.”
The door opened and a well-dressed man with a briefcase came into the lobby of the Travelodge. The men snuffed out their cigarettes. Spike removed his dark woolen watch cap.
“I’m McBride,” McBride said in an uninflected, middle-level executive voice, and took a paper from the pocket of his overcoat. “Acknowledge who you are when I call your name. — Ambest?” he said.