On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery (16 page)

17

The news about the
beatings in the park started to get some attention in the local media.
The Crawford Union Star
carried a story on the front page of its local section about the assaults and suggested that the beatings were hate crimes because several of the victims were gay. Channel 13 ran it as its second lead story on the six o’clock news and
MetroCrawford
, the local alternative newspaper, ran it as a cover story.

The attention would bring more of a police involvement, at least at first, which was a good thing. I found it a little disturbing that before the victims were identified as gay no one was really up in arms about the situation. Eli wasn’t gay, but he was beaten just as badly as if he were, and it didn’t seem right that when it was alcoholic street bums getting beaten there wasn’t a single reporter interested. Then again, there wasn’t a united front of street alcoholics in Crawford like there was a united organized front of gays and lesbians.

The Crawford Gay and Lesbian Community Center was a political force to be reckoned with in Crawford. I knew a little bit about the center from Monique, but she wasn’t a big fan of the place. She respected some of the efforts the center made but found the people there cliquish and self-serving. Monique was a proud lesbian woman and secure enough that she didn’t feel the need to shout it angrily at everyone within earshot.

With the beatings making it to the newspaper and the TV, the center decided to have a candle-lit march through the park to make a show of solidarity from Crawford’s gay and lesbian community. It was a nice idea, but I must admit I found it a tad hypocritical. Guys like Mikey and Froggy weren’t really accepted at the center because of their lifestyle. Their flamboyance and their promiscuous park activity were seen as hurtful to the overall gay and lesbian cause in Crawford. Mikey and Froggy fit too many old stereotypes that shamed the yuppified nouveau gays and lesbians, and my guess is that if they ever showed up at the center, they would not be welcomed with open arms. Sure, they would get a free AIDS test, but then they would politely be shown the door or at least made to feel that going out the door would be a good move.

Just the same, the beatings gave the center a visible opportunity to demonstrate to Crawford the power of numbers and the strength of the gay community. Monique was going to go because, as she explained, for all her differences with the center, the cause was a good one and a chance to let people know that what was going on was not acceptable in a civilized culture.

I went too, partly because I felt like doing something to honor Mikey and partly to see if there was anything for me to learn. The march began just after sunset and it went around the whole perimeter of the lake within the park, finishing at the bridge where there were to be some speeches and a prayer or two.

I fell in with my candle in one of the back rows, and I’d like to say I was perfectly comfortable and that being one of the very few heterosexuals in a group of gay people didn’t make me feel funny. But it did, in the same way that I feel a little strange when I’m the only white person in a room. I think most people who are honest with themselves will admit feelings like this, although many holier-than-thou super-liberals will say otherwise. It made me start to think about what it might be like to be in the minority and how that could shape your entire view of the world. Putting yourself in a position as a minority is probably a good thing to do once in a while to give you some idea of how a fair portion of the world feels.

The march moved slowly, and I recognized a few faces but not enough to really bond with anyone. I let my eyes wander through the crowd and I saw all types of people. There were men who looked effeminate and men who looked rough and lots in between. There were a lot of women with no makeup, sensible shoes, and short hair. There were some women with exaggeratedly tough veneers with just a little too much leather, denim, and piercings. It seemed like some were trying incredibly hard to make an impression with their appearance, and there were others who seemed to make their statements by not trying too hard to state anything.

As I marched on, I noticed a familiar pair of jeans a couple of rows up ahead of me. I let my eyes travel up the legs to the back and head and realized it was a very familiar pair of jeans. It was Lisa and she was walking hand in hand with a short, squat woman in a leather biker jacket and so many piercings in her face that it looked like she fell down a flight of stairs while carrying a tackle box. I found myself staring even when I didn’t want to.

While the march slowed, the squatty tackle box woman ran her fingers through Lisa’s hair. Lisa looked her in the eye and then the two of them kissed. At first it was just a quick lover’s-type peck, but in short order they were doing the whole tonsil-hockey thing. It was like a bad car wreck—I couldn’t not watch, but it gave me kind of a surreal feeling, like it was happening but it wasn’t. I’ve seen old girlfriends kiss somebody new, but it was always another guy. When that sort of thing happened in front of me I usually went off by myself and listened to Elvis sing something like “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” or “That’s When Your Heartache Begins.” Elvis didn’t have a song for this. The closest I could come was “A Fool Such as I,” but I wasn’t sure that would’ve worked.

You know, I’ll admit that on occasion I’ve accidentally looked in porno mags, you know, if there was an interesting article or something. They almost always have some sort of lesbian pictorial. I don’t ever recall one of the models being five foot one with a Dick Butkus hairdo and a face that would overwork a scrapyard magnet. Geez, to think all these years the dirty magazine business has been misleading me.

Eventually, Butkus got her tongue out of my ex-girlfriend’s esophagus and when their lips parted, a gobber of spit got hung up on the Butkus’s second lip piercing from the left. This car wreck was getting worse, and apparently so was my staring because Butkus turned around and saw me.

“Hey, take a picture next time—it lasts longer,” she said in her Ernest Borgnine voice.

It didn’t register with me because I was in a lesbo-induced trance.

“You, buddy, you got a problem?”

I came out of my hypnotic state and realized I was being confronted by an angry, semi-dwarfed, metalicized Dick Butkus. My mouth opened but nothing came out. In my head, Elvis was singing the first verse of “A Fool Such as I,” and I couldn’t imagine anybody ever feeling so foolish.

“Uh me?” was all I could get out.

“Never mind,” Butkus said. “Asshole.”

Next to her, Lisa waved and seemed as awkward as any person who ever lived. I waved back, ignoring Butkus. The two of them turned around, and I could tell that Lisa had to explain a few things. As they walked away, Butkus put her hand on Lisa’s ass.

I still hadn’t moved when a voice distracted me.

“Mr. Duffy, whatever are you doing here?” It was Froggy. He was standing, thrusting his one hip out and looking at me with his big brown eyes.

“Hey Froggy,” I said. “Here to show my respect for Mikey and the others.”

“You go, boy. Something gots to stop these rednecks. It’s beginning to cramp my dating life,” he said.

“I know.”

“Cops won’t do anything as long as it’s us fags being beat. After this publicity stunt stops, it will be business as usual.”

“I’m going to do something, Froggy.”

“What are you, the Lone Straight Ranger?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re not kidding.” Froggy had a rare serious moment. “There ain’t many like you, Mr. Duffy Dombrowski.”

“I get that a lot.”

“You all right with me. If I can ever do anything for you—you say so. And I don’t mean anything in the bushes, either.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Froggy,” I said.

After my conversation with Froggy, I decided to leave the park and skip the speeches. The night had gotten weird enough and I just wanted to go home and get some sleep. I was going to have to go through my record collection to find a song too.

18

Today was the day
slated for all of us to head out to the new halfway house for a tour of the facility while it was under construction, followed by an all-day retreat with the staffs and boards of both agencies. Retreats are the goofiest waste of time ever imagined, and the only redeeming thing about them is that they afford me time to think. Usually, that meant thinking absolutely nothing about the topic at hand.

The Michelin Woman didn’t say a word about my records, which meant she looked at them and they were acceptable. She kind of operated in an evil “no news is good news” mode, except it ought to be more like “no bad news sucks.” Trina saved a large piece of my ass with the tip and the fact that she stuck her neck out for me meant a lot. I still had ten good charts and about sixty-five shitty charts, so I was far, far away from being out of the woods.

Hymie asked if he could ride out with me today. Even if he had to bring up the record-keeping business, I still looked forward to sharing the forty-five minute ride out to Kingsville with him. The plan was to meet at Simon’s Deli, where Hymie and a handful of businessmen of his vintage held court every workday morning. Simon’s was west of Crawford’s industrial section, and it was almost exactly the same as it was when it opened in the 1930s. Old man Simon came up from Brooklyn after working in his grandfather’s deli, and he pretty much duplicated the business. Crawford had a good-size Jewish population made up of the men and women who migrated from the city, and they made Simon’s a little haven of their old home. Sid Simon, the grandson of the original owner, still wrote the daily specials on his grandfather’s old chalkboard, still wore the old-fashioned white apron, and still wiped down the wrought-iron ice-cream-store-style chairs and tables after each party left. As America continues to go through its drive-through-ization on its way to the kids’ soccer games, Simon’s was a throwback and a welcome alternative.

Even though Hymie and his friends were mostly retired and had turned their businesses over to their sons, they kept the ritual that they had started forty or fifty years ago. It’s what the opportunistic yuppies of today call networking, except these old businessmen got together because they not only wanted to succeed business-wise, they also cared about each other’s camaraderie. Today’s yuppie sees every relationship as an opportunity to advance something or to get leverage on something else.

I walked through Simon’s front door at exactly seven thirty, and there was Hymie at the corner table with his posse of Bernie, Duke, George, and Henry. I knew each of the guys from these occasional breakfast meetings that Hymie invited me to.

“Abi gezunt, gentlemen,” I said, taking the seat next to Duke and across from Hymie.

“This goy protégé of yours … Hymie,” Duke said. “Did you get him to convert yet? I got a rabbi who will do the circumcision.”

“You hear that, son?” George said, making a scissoring motion with his fingers. “Do you know what that means to your schmeckel?”

“Meshugeh, son, pay no attention to these old men,” Henry said. “Get some of Simon’s lox. They’re very good this morning, though the bagels are too chewy.”

I took Henry’s advice and got the lox on a sesame bagel with cream cheese. He was right on both counts, the lox were very good and the sesame bagel was a tad chewy. Nonetheless, it was a nice way to start the day.

Hymie finished up and we bid our farewells to the crew with Hymie taking care of everyone’s check. The men took turns each morning picking up the tab, and they all accused Duke of ordering more extravagantly when someone else was paying. We climbed into Hymie’s 2006 Cadillac DTS, the model that used to be called the DeVille. I guess technically it still was, though GM had gone to great lengths to try to distance the current Cadillacs from the cars of their heritage. It was a silly strategy, in my opinion. I highly doubted that the Generation Xers and the rappers and whatever demographic represents today’s youth would be interested in De­Villes, regardless of what they did to them. That’s precisely why I liked them.

Now, they’re advertised in goofy magazines like
Maxim
or
Stuff
and are all muscled up to look “extreme”—whatever the hell that is. The result is you get old guys with osteoporosis and three hairs left on their heads putting on their cardigans and getting into some vehicle that looks like a car that could win at Daytona. The paradox of the situation is that guys like Hymie have been trading in one DeVille for the other every two years and wouldn’t entertain a single thought of doing anything else. So you get cars that can go 160 miles per hour in second gear and they’re driven by eighty-year-olds who go forty in the right-hand lane of the highway with their left turn signal on in perpetuity.

“You got any fights on the horizon, Duff?” Hymie asked, puffing on his Garcia Vega.

“There won’t be any fights for a little while,” I said.

“Why?” Hymie said.

“There was a bit of an incident in Kentucky.”

“What kind of incident?”

“The guy said some awful things about Smitty. Then he said some bad stuff about my mom and dad and being Irish and Polish. With all the stuff I’ve been dealing with, I lost it.”

“What happened?” There was concern in Hymie’s voice.

“I knocked him out,” I said.

“And for that you get suspended?”

“I did it with a thumb and elbow. I broke the guy’s jaw.”

“You are a crazy Irishman.” He looked at me and laughed, playfully slapping me in the face.

“Son, tell me about this paperwork problem you got.” He changed the subject, but kept his eyes on the road and didn’t change his expression.

“Ah, Hymie, it’s my own damn fault. Most of the paperwork is bullshit. I’d rather spend the time with the people than writing about it.”

“This Claudia, she’s none too happy. It could cost you your job, you know.”

“I know that, Hymie, and I make no excuses. I should do it.”

“Son, the place needs you. You’re the soul of the place. I’ve never been a big one on regulations, but you can’t ignore them.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“You know I try not to interfere with how the place is run. If she wants you to go for legitimate reasons, I won’t intervene.”

“I understand that and wouldn’t expect you to.”

We were quiet for a while after that. He was direct and honorable in how he handled things with people. Good news or bad news, he delivered it directly and without manipulation. Hunched over, short, bald, about 140 pounds, with thick glasses, he was a man’s man.

We went out Route 27, which had beautiful trees and an occasional deer and not much of anything else. It’s basically two lanes that take you to some of the most forgotten places in the state. About every ten miles there’s a gas station with a convenience store, or when you hit the really big metropolises, you’ll get an Agway. It’s the kind of highway where running into deer and falling asleep due to the boredom run neck and neck for the lead in causing fatalities. Along the way, we passed the sign for Forrest Point and I got to thinking of that trio of women in the jail group. They were clearly linked together. It was obvious not only from the tattoos but also from the way they related to each other. It was more than just a friendship; it was almost some sort of sycophantic bonding. Like they were all united toward something. Whatever it was, it seemed evil to me.

Hymie threw in his Louie Prima CD. He was a huge Prima fan, which certainly didn’t fit with being Jewish. Prima’s music recently caught fire again when the Gap ran a commercial with Brian Setzer’s version of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” Prima was the real deal and was more rock and roll than anything else. Hymie had the CD queued up to “Buona Sera” and he was starting to groove. First his brake foot started to tap, then, as sax man Sam Butera lit into his solo, Hymie replaced the tapping with all-out stomping. By the time Prima joined in on the trumpet, Hymie was slapping his gnarled-up, arthritic hand to his thigh and improvising his own scat. New Orleans jumpin’ jazz with a Brooklyn Jew accent is really something you’ve got to hear. Then he’d throw his head back and shimmy so much that the four or five hairs that went across the top of his head would get messed up.

We pulled into the parking lot of the soon-to-be halfway house with Hymie and Louie dueting on the “The Sheik of Arabie.” The building was being renovated so there were several pickup trucks and a handful of contractors mulling around. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot to the left of the building, and I recognized Monique’s older Volvo and Claudia’s Camry.

The building wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, but nowhere wasn’t far away. Therapeutically, that had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it meant very few distractions for the clients, giving them the opportunity to focus exclusively on their treatment.

On the negative side, it meant there were very few distractions, giving the clients the continual nightmare of focusing only on their treatment. Although a lot of human service professionals will have you believe that a person can spend all day doing nothing but focusing on themselves, talking about themselves, and examining themselves, I don’t think it’s a very practical idea. Short periods away from bad situations help, but after even a short amount of time, people start getting buggy. Spending all day talking about yourself makes you completely self-absorbed, which I never found to be therapeutic for anything. Unless you’re a social worker, and then talking about yourself all day is a fun and necessary professional activity. It beats working anyway.

The waiting area/lobby of the building was half done and there were the requisite coffee and goodies set up on a long folding table. The table was filled with simple carbohydrated deep-fried goodies along with fat, tasteless bagels and opened tubs of various cream cheeses. There was one of those fifty-cup percolators going, making what I knew would be horrible human-services coffee.

There were stickies at the sign-in desk for us to write our names and titles on and stick to our shirts. Espidera was there and tried his “shalom” routine with Hymie and gave me one of those fist handshakes that are now in vogue with athletes and celebrities. I saw Monique talking to a woman with shoulder-length brown straight hair and wearing those very thin, nerdy black glasses, the kind that Ashleigh Banfield and that woman who did the news on Saturday Night Live wore. There was something particularly sexy about those glasses. I think it gave the woman that kind of smoldering librarian look, the kind that made you think the woman was just dying to free herself from all the inhibitions and restrictions that the professional world forced on her. That, or she was nearsighted.

I went over to Monique with my cup of coffee. Monique was wearing baggy high-waisted men’s pants, a white turtleneck, and a blue blazer, which against her dark skin made her look strikingly handsome.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hey Duff, good morning,” Monique said. “Duff, this is Katy. She works at the Eagle Heights clinic.”

I extended my hand. Katy briefly smiled but had a look to her that stated, or at least tried real hard to state, that she was all business and not a flighty girl right out of college. Young women entering the social-work field often work very hard at the feminist thing, and they put a lot of effort into the look of being all business.

“Hi Katy,” I said. “How long have you been at the clinic?”

“Four months,” Katy said. “But I did my externship here for the previous year.”

I never understood the difference between an internship and an externship. For Katy, making the point that she had done her externship here was a way of pointing out that she had far more experience than four months. Being new and young in this business is tough. A lot of counseling skills come from what you’ve experienced in life, and if you haven’t had a chance to experience a lot in life, then your skills will be limited. Counselors like Katy tried to compensate for that by looking serious and immediately adopting as much psychobabble into their vocabulary as possible. It was a futile attempt to cover up the fact that the bulk of their life’s experience has been obtained in dorm rooms and on the campus quads. When college kids like this got clients like, say, Walanda on their caseloads, the clients had a great time taking them for a ride.

Bowerman called for everyone’s attention and took the time to introduce the board members present and then asked Espidera to say a few words.

“Good morning, everyone,” Espidera was doing his best sincerity act. “I just feel so blessed to be able to bring to this area such a needed resource.”

“Especially if you need the deduction,” I whispered to Monique, who smirked inconspicuously.

“The real credit goes to all of you,” Espidera continued turning toward Claudia and Bowerman. “Especially to Claudia and Rhonda for the leadership and direction you’ve both shown to this organization.”

It was nauseating but, thankfully, it didn’t last long. From there we were walked through the building where we got to see the suites the patients would live in. They were suites because each bedroom had a small alcove off of it for any children. There was a group dining room that wasn’t finished, but I could already tell that it was going to be furnished in that faux-homey way that somehow screamed institutional while trying to accomplish the opposite. There was a lot of that in these types of places.

We got to see the multipurpose room, a room where lectures, multi-family counseling, and probably any type of exercise class would be held. There were two separate rooms for group therapy, one with a two-way mirror for observation. There were three small offices for the staff to do their individual sessions and a large office for Bowerman. There was also an unfinished area that Bowerman told us was going to be another multipurpose area that wasn’t complete yet and so we didn’t get to see it.