Revenge of the Cootie Girls (22 page)

“Did you have cooties?” I ventured weakly.

“You're the one with the fucking cooties!”

Okay, we weren't going to bond that way. I decided to attempt another tried-and-true bonding technique, the enemy-of-my enemy strategy.

“Julie Goomey is a bitch,” I said. “She really fucked me over, and my friends too. We're in the same boat.”

“No, we're not. I have the gun. You think I don't know that she's been fucking with all of us? She let us know, in her special little way, that Johnny was hiding out on Park Avenue. That's how we found the girl hiding in the closet, got the tip about the strip joint, and started tracking you.”

“Don't you folks adhere to a code wherein you don't kill innocent bystanders?”

“You're not so innocent, princess,” she said.

That's when I remembered this other mob story I read, out of Italy. The authorities there thought they'd broken the back of the Sicilian Mafia when they jailed all the top men. But they didn't bank on the women of the families, who took over, and were even more ruthless than the men. No longer were other women and children safe in vendettas. Makes ya think.

“What do you know about Julie?” I said. “I mean, I haven't seen her in a long time. Why was she fucking with everyone this way?”

“She's been screwing my bastard husband for the last five or six years, that we know. She's been running our financial operations for almost as long, though we didn't know that until Johnny was about to go to jail. She was supposed to turn over control to us, but she disappeared and Granny vanished from the hospital. It's been a shitty couple of days, and on top of everything else, I'm fucking premenstrual. So don't give me a hard time.”

She looked at her watch. “It's time to go. You're gonna have to push Granny's wheelchair.”

She took out two pairs of handcuffs and ordered me to put her granny in the wheelchair.

The woman, dead to the world, weighed a ton. It was like trying to manipulate a ninety-pound sack of cooked oatmeal. At one point, I accidentally swung Granny, and her hand went flying, smacking me in the face. That gave me an idea.

I swung Granny a couple more times to get her arms moving, and then, suddenly, I smacked the gun out of the Perrugia woman's hand with Granny's left hand. It fell to the floor and she went for it. I followed her, and when she tried to cut me off, I beat her some more with her own granny, smacking her upside the head.

The woman dodged. Granny faked her out with her right and then slapped her with her left.

“Stop that!” the Perrugia sister said.

Granny slapped her again. She was inches from the gun when I dumped her granny on top of her and made a break for the weapon.

Her hand reached it a half-inch before mine.

“Stop right there!” She pointed the gun at me, and gently shoved her granny aside.

“Now you're really in for it. Now I'm going to hurt you bad,” she said. “You're going to die slow tonight. One of my cousins has a meatpacking plant. How'd you like to go through the hamburger grinder alive instead of dead?”

“I wouldn't,” I said, weakly.

“Too late. Now, get Granny into that wheelchair.”

I wrestled her into the chair.

“Put your hands on the handles.”

After she cuffed me to the chair, she threw a blanket over her grandmother's shoulders to cover my cuffs, and fastened Granny's seatbelt.

“Let's go. Don't make any more trouble. I'm sure you're smart enough to know that.”

Yeah, I'm a smart girl. After the fact.

I'm going to die, I thought. I've thought this more than once, from times I've had guns on me, all too often, to my last bout with stomach flu when I was sure I'd picked up some weird life-threatening virus from a trip to the rain forest with Mike. But this time, I couldn't see a way out of it. I started to cry.

“Can the waterworks, princess,” the woman says. “Or it'll be worse.”

I was having a hard time regaining control. Another sob escaped. My tears moved her not a bit, just made her angrier.

“Get control. Or I will make your friends suffer before I kill them too.”

I closed my eyes. I sucked back the tears. I calmed myself.

18

I
PUSHED GRANNY
out of the room while Mrs. Johnny Chiesa followed close behind. The thirty or so feet to the elevator was the longest thirty feet of my life. When the elevator arrived it was pretty crowded, with a bunch of people who seemed to know each other, probably coming from the same soiree. Carefully, I backed in with the wheelchair, so I was jammed right up against some zonked-out party kid with bleached blond hair and thirty-seven earrings in his face. The head woman slid in beside me and the doors closed. We rode down a couple of floors and stopped; the doors opened again, producing a breeze. A man in a paint-covered shirt got on.

All I could think was, I'm going to die, and none of these festive strangers know it. This was the only audible voice in my head now. Normally, at this moment, what would pass before my eyes is not my past but my made-up past. Because, when I die, a very special fake obit my friend Louis Levin and I put together will air, and ANN's worldwide viewers will see me Forrest Gump-style, in a number of historical moments. Me, in slinky red dress and high heels, at the Battle of the Bulge, during Nixon's trip to China, waiting on the moon with a Hawaiian lei to greet Neil Armstrong when he takes his giant leap for mankind. There's me on the arm of playwright-actor Sam Shepard, on my way to Scandinavia to pick up my Nobel prizes for both peace and literature. In our last update, we had added a few testimonials from celebrities and regular folks, culled from infomercials, so that Cher and Victoria Principal thanked me for solving their hair-care problems, an Illinois autoworker credited me for relieving his male itch, and a bunch of nice retired couples sang my praises for teaching them how to buy real estate with no money down. And at the end, there are thousands of grief-stricken North Koreans prostrate before giant pictures of me in Pyongyang.

But this time, my past, made up or otherwise, didn't flash before my eyes. My future did, or, rather, the future I could be losing out on, and what I saw was me with Mike, and me alone in some strange place, and me with my girlfriends in thirty years, a bunch of laughing old women pinching young Italian guys' asses while on vacation in Rome.

The door opened at the lobby, and I had started to leave when I heard, “Yut Ya Yah.”

“He's stuck on your hair,” said a guy with black eyeliner and fangs.

I tried to turn around to see but couldn't. There was a shriek of pain.

“Careful, careful,” said the man with fangs. We all moved out of the elevator en masse. The Perrugia woman went to the desk and said, “Do you have any scissors? This boy is stuck to my friend.”

In the mirror on the far wall, I could see that the kid with thirty-seven earrings in his face was stuck to the back of my head. Somehow, my corkscrew hair and his earrings had bonded to produce a Velcro effect.

While the clerk at the desk looked for scissors, the guy with the fangs was walking out with his boyfriend, laughing. It hit me then: The wig-wearing women are going to turn me into hamburger. I'm going to become someone's burger. I could end up in the school lunch program! And not just me, my friends. No matter what I do now, they're going to kill us.

But … I had a shield on the front and the back. Just the way Frankie the Fish couldn't shoot Johnny Nostrils, she ain't gonna shoot me now. We're in public—and I have her granny.

“You're going to have to come with me,” I whispered to the earring-faced boy. “Hang on.”

Then, as the man with fangs and his boyfriend were opening the glass doors to leave the hotel, I took off.

“Hold the door!” I shouted, running with the wheelchair. Earring Boy was screaming, but after a short and painful lag, his survival instinct kicked in and he ran to keep up with me. The guy with fangs held the door. The Perrugia woman was shouting, “Wait, stop!”

“Check the seventh-floor utility closet!” I screamed, as we sailed through the doors.

I turned quickly onto the pavement, without thinking, and headed east, towards First Avenue. The earring guy was half piggybacked on me, screaming. The wheelchair was picking up momentum. I leaned forward, and Earring Boy leaned with me. I put my feet on the bar at the back of the chair, throwing my weight and that of the boy forward to give us thrust and keep us from falling over backwards. Granny's unconscious head swung back and forth, from side to side.

Down 21st Street we rolled, scattering a small group of late-night diners near First Avenue. I could hear the Perrugia woman hollering after me.

At the corner of First, I leaned to the right, after announcing my attentions to the kid stuck to the back of my head, who was now fully piggybacked. Granny's wheelchair took the turn on one wheel. We had made it to 20th Street when the chair hit a rock and we all tipped over.

“Yai yai yai,” screamed the earring kid as we collapsed in a heap. I tried to get us both up, but it wasn't possible with my hands cuffed to the now empty wheelchair.

“Stop right … there,” said Jojo the Health and Safety Dog, huffing and puffing. She was about ten yards behind us, with her gun in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. She put the gun and the scissors down in order to get us and the wheelchair back up and Granny back into it, but that didn't do me much good, being handcuffed and all.

“Now I'm gonna have to kill this kid too,” she said. “Sorry, kid.”

I felt the weeping boy attached to me reach into his jacket pocket. He pulled something out. I saw a flash of black, and there was a gun to the head of Granny.

“Ya ya ya,” he said.

“I think he's saying that you're not going to kill him, and if you don't give him the gun, he's going to shoot your Granny,” I translated through huffs and puffs.

“Ya ya ya.”

“He says you should give him your gun.”

She hesitated.

“Ya ya ya.”

“Do it now, or Granny gets it.”

She did it.

“Ya ya ya.”

“Now unlock my handcuffs.”

She did.

“Give me her gun,” I said to the young man. “And you can cut yourself free.”

He took the scissors from JoJo the Health and Safety Dog and very carefully freed himself.

“Wha ya fyuck izh zhizh awout?” he said. His mouth was pretty torn up and bloody. There were tufts of red hair sticking out from every one of his bloody earrings.

Before I could answer, he said, “I'm going yo frow up,” and he leaned into the gutter and vomited. I counted my small blessings then, that he'd waited until he was freed from the back of my head before he threw up.

I handcuffed the Perrugia sister to the wheelchair and took her cell phone.

“What's your sisters' number?” I said.

She gave it to me and I dialed. The earring boy started walking weakly away, cursing, in the direction of Bellevue Hospital.

“Sorry!” I said, but he didn't respond.

“Yeah?” said the voice that answered the phone.

“There's been a change of plans,” I said. “I have your granny, I have your sister, and I have the gun. So what are we going to do now?”

It was completely deserted under the elevated overpass between Asser Levy Place and the East River. Even the hookers who worked this area had gone to bed for the night. There was only the faintest breeze. A piece of paper blew slow-motion down the street. I could hear the roar of traffic rising and falling from the FDR, and stranger roars coming from the drains in the gutters. A car alarm went off a few blocks away.

“I've been tampered with, I've been tampered with,” the car alarm said, over and over. I made a note to get myself one and hang it around my neck from now on.

Granny was still out like a light.

A van turned off 23rd Street and slowly approached, stopped right across the street. The doors opened. I put the gun to Granny's head. Two women got out of the front, and then they pulled my friends, their hands tied, out of the van.

“Come here,” I said. “Slowly.”

When they got to the middle of the street, I said, “Stop right there.”

They stopped.

“Drop your guns.”

There was no motion. I think they thought I was bluffing, maybe that I was too much of a “princess” to shoot someone.

“Don't fuck with me,” I said, pulling Granny's head up by the hair. “I'll shoot her. Hey, she's had a long, full life. So I want to see your guns on the ground.”

There were guns on the ground. It made me feel a little safer, though I was sure they had some weapons in reserve.

“We want to see Granny and Wanda,” said one of the women.

“Walk out five steps,” I said to JoJo the Health and Safety Dog. I pushed Granny just barely into the light. I still had the gun to her head.

“Let my friends go,” I said.

They released my friends. Sally was staggering and had to lean against Claire for support. She looked bad. They walked past me and sat down on a patch of grass in Asser Levy Place.

“Wanda, take Granny. The documents you want are in her lap,” I said.

The Perrugia sisters ran forward, grabbing Granny and Jojo. Suddenly, two more women jumped out of the van, followed by two men, all with guns drawn, and came towards me. We appeared to be massively outgunned.

That's when JoJo's head came off.

“You are under arrest,” said Special Agent Jeff Walter, half man, half Safety Dog. He started reading the Miranda, a bunch of feds appeared, and a bright light suddenly shone down the street.

Hey, I'm not
that
stupid. The first thing I did after I got off the phone with the Mafia queen was call the feds from the nearest untraceable pay phone. It was my card to play—I had Granny and Mrs. Johnny Chiesa. The next thing I did was, I called the All News Network and got a crew down here.