Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (12 page)

Dad took his pal’s dog tags and the pack of Luckies in his shirt pocket. From that day forward it was three packs a day until the afternoon he handed me the .45, made a gurgling sound and expired.

I never took up smoking myself. A nasty, dirty, purposeless habit. Kind of like life. Who needs a double dose of that?

Like I said, me and Marge, my partner in crime, had taken up bank robbing. We’d both been unemployed for over a year and were tired of eating beans out of a can.

The first four or five jobs went down smooth as silk. We netted almost sixty grand apiece. No one was hurt. And the cops didn’t have a clue, since neither of us had any priors.

Then came the last one, which ran right off the fuckin’ rails.

It all started when I pistol-whipped a teller who wasn’t stuffing the cash fast enough into the canvas sack I’d thrown at her.

The security guard took umbrage with my rough treatment of the gentler sex. Anger pulsed through his paltry brain faster than common sense. Deciding I was distracted by the money, he went for his 9mm where it lay on the floor in front of him. He’d tossed it there at Marge’s request moments after we made our grand entrance, shouting obscenities and waving our weapons aloft.

“Drop the fuckin’ gun, asswipe!” But Marge forgot to scoop it up.

Now Marge, standing on the bank manager’s desk surveying the scene through the slit eyes of her Martha Stewart mask, caught the guard’s movement. Without the slightest hesitation, she squeezed off a round. Your marksmanship doesn’t have to rival Natty Bumppo’s when you’re using Black Talon hollowpoints. Half the guard’s face ended up smeared like pepperoni pizza across the nearest plate glass window.

The tellers found a whole new level of motivation to slam that cash into the canvas sacks I’d provided.

I walked over and looked down at the dead guard.

“Jesus, Marge,” I said. “Why’d you have to do that?”

“It was him or us,” she said.

3.

After the hold-up fiasco, we hid out in a sixth-floor-walkup shotgun flat in Hoboken, New Jersey.

It was too hot to leave town. And too hot to stay. The cops were everywhere. It was the dog days of summer and the apartment had no air conditioning.

The bar where Yo La Tengo first played was just around the corner. When I went out, every guy in a nylon Just Do It wife beater and navy blue watch cap was an undercover cop. I was so paranoid, I could barely make it down to the corner deli. The gook running the produce store next to the deli had to be CIA. Or maybe NSA.

Thank god I wasn’t some raghead with an expired student visa.

Taking a murder rap was never part of my plan. All I’d wanted to do was stick up a few banks, pistol-whip the occasional teller, and stockpile enough loot so I could move to Costa Rica and open an ice cream parlor.

Now all I wanted to do was disappear. Like acting out a movie script written in lemon juice.

The apartment belonged to a writer friend of mine named Eric who’d gone to Greece with his girlfriend for the summer. Frisky fucking on the white sands of Mykonos, etc., etc. Knowing I was out of work and living in a cardboard box, he left me the key.

I sat on his Salvation Army couch gnawing my knuckles.

“Your nerves are eating you alive,” Marge said.

“Thanks for the heads up.”

“You need to chill before you get a cerebral hemorrhage.”

“We’re dead. Finished. Don’t you see that, Marge? We’ll never get out of Jersey alive.”

She jumped up, pulled out her .357 magnum and started waving it like a drunk with a whiskey bottle. Her eyes flared like Fourth of July sparklers.

“We’ll go out in a blaze of gunfire. Dead coppers everywhere. We’ll make a video and send it to Oprah. You and me sitting here at this coffee table, eating vegetarian and talking about self-realization. Marge and Bill. The new age Bonnie and Clyde.”

Luckily the doorbell rang. It was Looney Tunes, the meth addict from down the hall. I let him in.

He was constantly on the move. A blur. Like the Roadrunner.

He pushed past me: “Marge, baby.”

They hugged. A tad too long and a tad too close for just friends. When they stepped apart, I could see Tunes had a hard-on. I’d heard that shit he injected made you a regular satyr until you crashed.

“Hey, Tunes,” Marge said. “We got to get Bill unstressed ’fore he blows a gasket.”

Tunes began to tap out an impromptu soft shoe. “Why don’t we do it in the road … ,” he sang.

Pissed for every good reason and none at all, I walked into the bedroom and slammed the door. I sat on Eric’s bed. A stack of books sprawled across the night table. I extracted a coffee-table-sized volume and opened it. The title page read Palaces of Goa. Inside were dozens of pictures of gaudy, otherworldly palaces built by Portuguese adventurers and merchant princes from the spoils of the East. For a brief time I was transported far, far away from the hollow streets of Hoboken.

4.

When I came out of the bedroom several hours later, Marge informed me it was my turn to go down to the deli for supplies.

“Get some egg salad,” Tunes said.

“And some of that dark Russian rye bread,” Marge said.

Taking a $50 from one of the bags of loot, I started down the narrow treacherous stairs. It seemed as though the building was deserted. In the dozen or so times I’d been up and down, I never saw anyone either on the stairway or down the asshole brown corridors that faded into shadows as murky as an abortion clinic in the Bible belt. I was wearing Vans, so I hardly made a sound. Just an occasional squeak when I pivoted too fast.

At the second floor I pulled up short, confronted by the ratcheting sound of a door chain unhooking. Click-click went the deadbolt. The door across from the stairwell opened. A woman teetered forth.

Plastered was my first take.

Then I realized she was wearing some kind of metal braces on her legs. One hand held a metal cane. Her eyes met mine and she took my breath away. They were the deep purple of pokeweed berries ripening in the vacant lot across the street. Without the slightest hesitation, I dove into them.

When she smiled, her face shimmered like an angel caught in a ray of heavenly light. Long perfect nose. Creamy brow. High cheekbones, angular and resolute. A moss green T-shirt hugged her twin guavas. Definitely kick ass.

“Did I surprise you?” she asked.

“No. No. I was on my way out to the deli. You’re the first person I’ve met since I moved in the other day. Up on six.”

“I didn’t hear anyone moving in,” she said.

“It’s a furnished sublet,” I said. “I guess you hear all the comings and goings?”

“With these fucking things, I don’t get out much.” One of the metal braces creaked when she moved. She blushed. “Excuse my French.”

“Hey,
no problemo
.” My eyes just kept eating her up, like some high school freshman with a crush on the homecoming queen.

“Do you always stare at women you meet in hallways?”

“Can I buy you a beer?” I asked, fixating on the ancient tile floor. “My name’s Bill, by the way.”

She gave me one of those is-that-the-best-you-can-do looks.

“Alice,” she said. “And thanks for the offer. But I was just going down for the mail.”

Suddenly I had this vision of the two of us living by the beach in one of the broken-down palaces of Goa. Meeting some
swami
who performed a miracle so she was no longer crippled.

I shrugged it off and started to descend the final circuit of stairs. There was no point in involving Alice in my personal nightmare.

“Do you play Monopoly?” she called after me. “I’m always looking for someone to play Monopoly.”

5.

The torrid dog days rolled on like a tepid sea upon a tropical shore. I was as stir-crazy as a cat on a hot tin roof.

Marge kept slamming back the
tequila
and going off to the bedroom to boff with Tunes. I slept on the couch wearing earplugs and an eye mask.

Somewhere in there I started going down to Alice’s to play Monopoly. She was cutthroat, and I usually ended up in bankruptcy. I always brought a six-pack of ice cold Heinekens from the deli. But the alcohol didn’t affect her concentration. After the game, we’d talk about life and stuff. And finish up the beers.

I was in love. But I wasn’t sure about Alice. She was very cautious. Because she was a cripple, everyone always tried to take advantage of her.

When we ran out of things to talk about, we watched gangster movies on her Direct TV hookup. They always ended badly.

“How come you never talk about yourself?” asked Alice.

“Boring,” I said.

“I’d be interested.”

I realized suddenly that she was falling for me. I couldn’t let that happen. It was too dangerous.

“This is where I came in,” I said, climbing to my feet.

Alice didn’t stand up.

“Will you come and play Monopoly tomorrow?”

“I think I’m tied up for the rest of the week. But I’ll call you.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“Well…” I backed toward the door. Then turned, twisted open the dead bolt and ran out like a lunatic.

6.

The cops were closing in. I could feel it. They knew we’d lain up in a lair somewhere close to the robbery scene. Because we’d left our stolen getaway car in the bank parking lot.

Actually, Hoboken was the next town over. We caught a bus moments after we left the bank.

But the cops were getting closer for sure. Sniffing the pavement for the scent of our paranoia.

Back on the sixth floor without Alice, I was always in a pissed-off mood.

Eric didn’t have cable, so I couldn’t watch old movies on TCM. I tried reading, but I could never get past the first sentence.
“The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers…”
I’d close the book and stare at the ceiling. There was an old water stain that looked something like a hog’s scrotum.

“You need to get out more,” Marge opined.

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Tsk, tsk. No one likes a grouch.”

One day Tunes left for parts unknown and Marge flipped out too. Pacing back and forth for hours in stony silence. Stripping down her .357, oiling it and putting it back together again five times a day.

I figured pretty soon we’d be at each other with knives or razor blades.

Then came September first. My birthday. I stayed in bed with the covers over my head until noon. By then I was sweating like a Greek in a gay bathhouse.

Someone knocked on the apartment door.

“It’s the cops,” yelled Marge. She skimmed her gun off the coffee table and dove behind the sofa.

Wrapped in a dirty sheet, I walked to the door and peered through the peephole. It was Alice. I opened the door.

“You never called,” Alice said.

“You don’t have a phone.”

Alice shrugged. “What do you want from me?” She thrust a small package at me. “Here. For your birthday.”

I sensed Marge behind me, gaping over my shoulder.

“Let’s go down to your place,” I said, stepping into the hall and pulling the door closed behind me.

“Shouldn’t you get dressed first?” asked Alice.

I looked down at the sheet draped around my loins. Oops. I went back inside. But I didn’t invite Alice in.

“Who’s that?” Marge asked, raising an eyebrow for effect.

“Shush.”

“Don’t shush me. I’m your partner. I have a right to know about your peccadilloes. Your dirty little secrets.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about trust.”

I jerked on a pair of Levis; scrambled for a clean T-shirt. Scooting into the bathroom, I took a leak and brushed my choppers.

Marge hung in the doorway.

“Your urine looks awfully yellow,” she said. “Are you sure you’re drinking enough water?”

“Let’s worry about that later. I’ve got to go.” I brushed past her. “Just hold down the fort, Marge. I’ll be back.”

7.

When we got down to Alice’s apartment, she had this whole birthday setup going. A chocolate-cherry cake she’d baked herself. Fruit punch that was mostly vodka. And my present. Which turned out to be one of those medical bracelets engraved with my name and blood type.

We drank two glasses of the fruit punch. The next thing we were naked. Alice turned out the lights. With the shades drawn against the afternoon sun, the room was dusky and pervaded with lust like a pornographic French novel.

Then I heard the hobnail boots of the SWAT team rushing up the stairs, their gear creaking and rattling.

Alice put a finger to my lips.

An amplified voice echoed from above: “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”

Then Marge’s shouted reply: “You’ll never take me alive, coppers.”

A wasp’s nest of gunfire erupted, interrupted by several explosions. Boom! BOOM!

Alice pulled me closer.

A ray of sunlight burst through a rip in the old paper pull-down blinds and streaked across the room illuminating Alice’s torso. Next to the areola of her right breast, a tiny black freckle hovered like a fruit fly. As I placed my lips over it, I knew I had found Goa.

Then What Happened?

Sitting on the couch with Inez, I’m using a big ass needle to dig an itty-bitty splinter out of the fleshy part of my thumb, where it’s been festering all week. Inez lolls next to me. Her pale puppies cuddled up in a magenta push-up bra rise and fall like albino pomegranates bobbing on the incoming tide.

I’m clad exclusively in the South Park boxers Inez gave me last week for my birthday. It’s hot as Hades in mid-July in Beaufort, South Carolina. Live oaks dripping Spanish moss, lavish sailing sloops, bygone Southern charm and rednecks up the wazoo.

Inez’s husband, Dave, is away on a business trip, so Inez gives me a call. I don’t have anything else going, so I show up with a twelve pack of Budweiser, on sale.