Winning is Everything
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Authors: David Marlow
WINNING IS EVERYTHING
ALSO BY DAVID MARLOW
I Loved You Wednesday
Yearbook
WINNING IS
EVERYTHING
David Marlow
iUniverse.com, Inc.
San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai
Winning is Everything
All Rights Reserved © 1983, 2000 by David Marlow
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by iUniverse.com, Inc.
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Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 0-595-12976-5
ISBN: 9781450247290 (ebook)
Contents
For Joan and for Gwyn
and for Freda, who brought us all together
…Ah, Fame, Fame—That glittering bauble … It is mine!
—Captain Hook in Peter Pan,
by J. M. Barrie
Ron Zinelli’s mother always told him he should marry a rich girl. “Just as easy to fall in love with money as with poverty,” she was fond of telling him as she stood over the kitchen sink in their small Buffalo apartment, peeling potatoes.
And Ron believed her.
Years later, Ron’s mother modified her thoughts, claiming it was the attainment of success that brings fulfillment to a man’s life. “Don’t be a nobody like your father,” Mrs. Zinelli instructed. “Score big while you’re young, and you can retire by the time you’re thirty-five. Are you listening to me?”
Ron was listening.
Mildred Zinelli made a special point, however, of telling Ron he probably could not score big, was not very likely to marry well unless, first and foremost, he became a gentleman.
“You have a charmed life,” she reminded her son time and time again. “You can have whatever you want. Just go after it. Do you believe me?”
Ron believed her. He truly believed her.
And since he believed her, the moment he finished college he and his good friend Gary Sergeant moved from the University of Michigan to New York so he could start out on his long road to success, begin learning how to become a gentleman, and get down to the business of finding himself a rich woman.
Two days after arriving in the Emerald City that was Manhattan, Ron Zinelli, the Prince of Buffalo, was lying on one of two beds in his and Gary’s shabby rooms on the fourth floor of the West Side Y, sweating profusely and downing the third bottle of a recently purchased six-pack of beer.
Staring up at the ceiling, Ron allowed numerous layers of peeling paint to create Rorschach images above him, and as he formed prehistoric monsters and ocean waves, he opened the fourth bottle of beer, undid the last button on his button-down shirt, and continued getting drunk.
Sunday in New York. June. And hot. Sweltering. No radio. No television. A not-so-hot air-conditioning system and some not-so-cold beer in a room obviously designed for manic-depressives.
But no big deal because it was, after all, a start. New York. Ron was finally there. Right there in the big time. The Big Apple. La Enchilada Grande. Sitting four stories above a pulsating West Sixty-third Street, preparing to meet Gary so they could look at still another apartment that might become their very own place, a base of operations in one of the more fashionably upwardly mobile neighborhoods, in the most exciting city in the world.
Ron got up off the bed. Tomorrow would be his first day at work, he had to meet Gary in less than an hour, and damned if he wasn’t going to have a good time until then.
Reaching for his shirt, Ron buttoned up his button-down, put on his thick eyeglasses, shoved all his eleven dollars and fifty cents into his pocket, and sprang from the room.
Strolling crosstown to the East Side of Manhattan half an hour later, heading toward First Avenue, Ron Zinelli couldn’t help but feel the pulsating rhythms of the city infusing him with an electric energy. There was a definite bounce to his step.
Eat your hearts out, you Buffalo hicks! You Michigan rubes! Zinellis made it to the fast lane!
Ron stopped at the red light on the corner and watched a never-ending flow of traffic heading uptown; motorists honking, taxi drivers hollering; everyone jockeying for control of a crowded boulevard.
The traffic light at the corner of Sixty-fourth and First Avenue switched gears, flashed green, and Ron speedily joined a gaggle of pedestrians crossing Sixty-fourth Street, chancing the traffic, the lot of them oblivious of hostile taxis cutting them off; unaware of Buicks and Volkswagens spitting endlessly out of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge’s upper roadway, cars filled with beachgoers heading home to centrally air-conditioned town houses or electrically fanned tenements, all of them eager to cool down behind closed doors in time for Ed Sullivan.
A drink, Ron decided, once his legs had delivered him to the security of the other side of the street, was clearly the calling of the moment. Nourishment to fuel the surveillance of the Prince’s new kingdom.
Besides, he still had fifteen minutes before he had to meet Gary at that apartment house on the corner of Sixty-seventh and First. His eyes darted across the street to a canopy above a bar: Maxwell’s Plum. He watched as young, attractive people milled in and out of the popular hangout.
Girls going to bars by themselves? New York was sure a lot different than Buffalo.
Ron watched as a mile-long limousine pulled up in front of the restaurant. The chauffeur killed the engine, jumped from the car, and performed a speedy Chinese fire drill as he raced around the car to open the passenger door.
A couple of snappy-looking couples took their time getting out of the sleek vehicle.
Ron studied the long, shiny black Cadillac, fender to bumper. Someday, he promised himself. Someday …
While staring at the limo, Ron decided that what he really should do that evening, his first night out on the town carousing by himself, was to score.
At Michigan, he’d been known as the university’s most prolific stud, sewing the cross-stitches of his wild oats through faculty teas, honorary dinners, pig parties, theme parties, sorority luncheons; virgins, sluts, debutantes, local trash—whoever was around.
There was something so likable in his forward, direct approach, his uncanny ability to bring almost anyone over to his side, even after she seemed determined not to like him. Something in those sexy bedroom eyes, the feeling of his large, smooth hands, the charm of the approach.
Ron switched on his charm, made ready his boyish smile, and crossing the street, bounded into Maxwell’s Plum.
The joint, as they say, was jumping.
Ron nuzzled his way through a series of secretaries, a trio of teachers, a sea of stewardi, and arrived at a vibrant spot, four-deep from the bar.
He was all set to remind himself he had but ten minutes before he had to meet Gary, when he saw, on the other side of the bar, the loveliest of soft-tanned faces peering at him invitingly from behind the celery stalk of her Bloody Mary.
Contact!
thought Ron as he slowly began inching his way through the maze of merriment to introduce himself.
“I love this view!” Gary Sergeant told the uninterested landlord as he made an enthusiastic, sweeping gesture toward the living-room window, acknowledging the apartment’s commanding twelfth-floor view of inner Queens, outer Brooklyn, and somewhere off in the hazy distance, past a tiny Statue of Liberty, the stepchild borough of Staten Island.
“How could you not love it?” asked the landlord as he crossed the floor to stand next to Gary at the window. “Hard to beat this panorama.”
Gary agreed. “Wait till Ron gets here. He’s going to adore the place. I just know he will.”
“Ron?” asked the landlord. “He the fellow was supposed to meet us here forty-five minutes ago?”
“That’s him,” said Gary, embarrassed by his friend’s tardiness. “Hope nothing’s happened.”
“Relax,” advised the landlord. “It’s a big city.”
“Sure is,” said Gary, looking downtown toward the bumper-to-bumper Sunday traffic accumulating along both levels of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. “Me and my buddy just got here,” Gary informed the landlord. “Been staying over at the Y. It’s quite a dump. When do you suppose we could move in?”
“When do you suppose you could give me a check?” asked the now-eager landlord with a knowing leer.
“Easy,” said Gary. “Soon as Ron gets here. I’m sure he’ll insist we take
it.”
“Sorry!” The landlord snapped businesslike fingers of regret. “I gotta show the place to a coupla girls later this evening. They’re coming in all the way from Jersey.”
“New Jersey?” Gary repeated softly. He had spent the past two days apartment-hunting across the skyscrapered plains of Manhattan and knew he was not likely to find a better spot than this. And so, as the thought of losing this perfectly suitable two-bedroom hi-rise apartment, conveniently situated twelve flights above a teeming East Sixty-seventh Street, sent an odd chill down his perspiring back, Gary tried to imagine which would be worse: signing up for the apartment even before Ron had a chance to see it or losing it to a pair of ladies due in from New Jersey.
“I’ll take it!” Gary announced to the landlord as he threw both caution and his bank account to the wind.
“Fine,” said the landlord with a smile. “You guys aren’t real go-go types or anything, are you? I mean, this is a very fashionable building. I don’t go for no crazy stuff or nothing.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about us,” Gary told the landlord. “We came to New York to work at the World’s Fair. I’m going to become a writer. Haven’t got time for any of that go-go stuff.”
“Writer, huh?” The landlord shook his head in mild disapproval. “Writers are crazy, but at least they’re quiet. What about your friend?”
“Ron?” asked Gary with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Oh, he’s so quiet, he’s practically a monk!”
And so the deal was struck.
Gary unloaded his not-so-worldly savings, handing over to the landlord, in exchange for a set of front-door keys, a check for both the first and last month’s rent, and then, once alone in his two-bedroom-river-view $550-a-month palace, tried to figure out how he and Ron were going to pay for it.
For openers, Gary figured it was sure time to check out of the Y. It mattered not that this new apartment on Easty Sixty-seventh Street boasted but a single hundred-watt naked bulb hanging from the kitchen fixture as its only evidence of furniture. It was still a hell of a lot more pleasant than their dreary room across town.
Gary lifted his pen from his shirt pocket, removed a small piece of scrap paper from his wallet, and scribbled a short note to Ron, letting him know he was going back to the Y to pull their things together and to check out. He’d return, no doubt, within the hour; and even if they would be camping out on bare floors that night in their sleeping bags, at least they’d be snoring in their own apartment.
After carefully lodging the note beneath the brassy 12A letters nailed to the front door, Gary bolted toward the stairwell, to trot down all twelve flights. He had no time to wait for the elevator. He had his own apartment in New York City now, and damned if he wasn’t more than a little anxious to get back to it.