Sex on the Beach
by
Raud Kennedy
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2012 Raud Kennedy
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover photos by Manson Kennedy
Discover other titles by Raud Kennedy at www.raudkennedy.com
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Raud Kennedy
Also by Raud Kennedy
Portland – Short Stories
Mad Rabbits
Top of the World
Streaking Venus
Stick Out Your Tongue
Twice Dead
Black Oak
Glimpses – Poems
Sean
The old wood cabin cruiser rocked softly in the wake from the boats motoring past the Marina. Their red and green running lights shimmied on the night’s black water. Across the harbor, the city lights of Boston lit the clouds with a milky fluorescence. The warm summer air filled with the rumble of another jet at Logan Airport as it stretched its wings and reached toward the heavens. There were four of us sitting around the card table on the deck of my creaking Chris Craft, myself, my girlfriend, Lisa, a pal of mine, Evan, and his wife, Samantha, but she went by Sam like on that old television show, Bewitched. Actually, when I think about it, Evan kind of looked like the Darren character on that show. He had a businessman’s haircut and always wore a blazer on his days away from the trading office. We were oil and vinegar, but we’d become friends back when I used to have to wear a suit to work every morning. But not anymore. I dressed like a bum and my hair hung to my shoulders.
We had a Ouija board on the card table, and so far it had spelled out, “sex.” I didn’t know if ghosts or spirits or whatever thought about sex, but with the rocking of the boat, I wasn’t going to put a lot of faith in it. Not that I normally would, but sometimes it would spell out some pretty spooky things, like misspelled names of dead friends and things like that, but now it just said sex, and that was cool with me.
Lisa nudged me. “Sean, you did that on purpose.”
I held my hands up in surrender. “I swear, I didn’t. I can’t help it if the spirits are horny. It must be these hot august nights and the sight of you two babes in clingy tank tops.”
Evan looked down at his lap and shook his head. “No, I confess, it was me.” He was kidding. He never messed with the game. He was very superstitious, especially when it came to reading the stock market. He’d buy or sell depending on what his morning horoscope in the Globe said, and the funny thing was that he actually made money for his clients. Who says the president shouldn’t have an in house astrologer? He was all for it.
Sam gave Evan a good shove. She knew him too well. “Don’t even say it. No more strip poker. You and Sean cheated last time.”
“Yeah, and you wore three bras,” I said, laughing as I got up. “Who wants another beer?”
“I do,” Evan and Sam said. Lisa shook her head. She was always shaking her head. She had trouble letting her hair down. In the year we’d been dating, I’d only seen her more than tipsy three or four times. Which was good. I’d dated girls who matched me drink for drink, and they weren’t a pretty sight heaving over a curb between two parked cars at the end of the night. No, Lisa was above that. She was what my little stepsister would call model pretty, tall, skinny, with long blonde hair, and blue eyes that could give you the warm fuzzies, or be so cold your nuts wished they’d never dropped. She did some modeling on the side for a few Newbury Street boutiques as favors to the friends of hers who owned them. That is when she wasn’t busy managing Diva’s, a lucrative hangout in Back Bay that served the smallest portions for the highest prices. Eating there was like being on a fat farm. Managing that place wasn’t a bad job for a twenty-four year old, but she was ambitious. She wanted to own her own restaurant by the time she was twenty-seven, and she might just do it.
I didn’t know what she saw in me. I owned a burger hut next to the sailing club on pier four in Charlestown. I’d named it Munchies, and the slogan went, “Burgers so tasty, you’ll be stoned after the first bite.” Lisa had always had a boyfriend. It was like she thought she needed one to be socially acceptable, and sometimes I felt like I was simply there to fill the role, like a round block fitting in the square hole. I brought out the fresh beers and passed them around. “Okay, back to the spirits,” I said. We all rested our fingertips on the indicator and waited for the horny ghost to speak up. The next few letters were “on the.” Now I knew someone was rigging the board. “Okay, which one of you is messing with it?”
Everyone shook their head. I raised my eyebrows at Lisa. This was her kind of humor. She liked to make us think the ghosts were spelling out the names of various drinks. Once she even conned us all the way through spelling out Tanqueray Martini. “Not this time,” she said. “I don’t even like Sex on the Beach drinks.”
“Yeah, but you do like sex on the beach?” Sam asked with a giggle. She was always good for a few laughs once the motion of the boat and the beer had loosened up her wifey composure. Lisa gave her a blank look and didn’t answer, which was answer enough. Lisa and Sam weren’t what you’d call girlfriends. They didn’t go to the bathroom together, if that says anything.
Evan cracked his knuckles, sending shivers up Lisa’s spine. She hated that and he knew it. “Come on, let’s finish it,” he said.
We put our fingertips back on the indicator, and when the next letter was B, I pushed my chair away from the table and leaned back. “Enough, either one of you is messing with the board, or the ghost is a lush and a horndawg.”
Lisa stood to go use the head. “I’ve had enough anyway. It’s getting late,” she said as the ship’s clock in the galley started to chime eight bells, the change of the midnight watch.
Evan drained the rest of his beer and set the can down on the card table. It landed with an empty tinny sound. “Yeah, we should get going. I don’t want to be on the road when the bars empty out. That’s asking to get pulled over.”
“I’ll drive,” Sam said with another giggle. Evan ignored her. He never let her drive if he was in the car. He lived in a world where the woman belonged in the kitchen, and the man in the living room behind his evening paper. When they had left, I stuffed the empties into a cardboard shortpack container and put the Ouija board away. I wasn’t a neat freak like Felix Unger, but empty beer cans strewn around a boat made me feel like inbred white trash from Maine. I guess you could call it a pet peeve of mine. Lisa handed me the last of the cans, and I folded up the card table. “Do you want to stay over?” I asked.
“Do you want me to?”
I put my arm around her waist and pulled her to me. She smelled like perfume and cigarettes, one of my favorite combinations going back to my days of bar hopping in the grunge clubs when I lived out in Seattle. “Always,” I said and moved to kiss her, which was a gamble. She had a way of hiding her feelings that made it difficult to know if she’d kiss me back, or turn her head and give me her cheek. I know, she sounds high maintenance, but we had our good times. Her sense of humor was as dry as the Sahara, and she could say the funniest things with the straightest of faces. And she was damned hard to win against in strip poker, which was probably the reason she liked to play it. But I didn’t mind losing, if you could call it that. I’d grown up on the Columbia River Gorge in a small town called Hood River, and had spent my share of summers on the nude beach at Rooster Rock, so nudity was no big deal.
It looked like the captain was going to get some. Undressing Lisa was like eating the leaves off an artichoke. It took time to get to her heart, but once you had, it was there. Sex with Lisa, when it happened, was like a heavy meal. She’d grind away on top of me with her eyes shut, and her evil twin would whisper sweaty words in my ear. I just wished her evil twin would come around a little more often. Afterward, she’d collapse on me, and I’d ease out of her, and then we were back to playing roles again. Having sex with her was the only time I didn’t feel like a round block being forced into a square hole. Sure, we talked, and she made me laugh, but she always kept me at a distance with that shaking of her head. I’d given up trying to act cool around her. Shit, I’d given up trying to pretend I was something other than who I was a long time ago. At thirty-one, I’d had my fill of that crap. I wasn’t going to play her Romeo when I knew in my heart I was Lothario.
Later, while she was still laying half on me, I said, “You know Lisa, have you ever wanted to go down to the Florida Keys?” It was something I’d wanted to do ever since I’d bought the boat a couple years ago.
“And be a parrothead in Margaritaville?” she said sleepily as she moved off me.
“Something like that. Once I get new engines for the boat, we could motor down the Atlantic Coastal Waterway all the way to Key West, the only place on the east coast where you can see the sun set over the ocean.”
She was dozing and had fallen asleep, which was probably for the better. I wasn’t up to having my dreams shot down. Her parrothead comment had said as much. She’d need some convincing to get her interested in the idea. Lisa wasn’t the adventurous type. Adventure to her was spending a weekend out on the Cape in Provincetown with her gay restaurant friends. That was all right by me. I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to drop the small fortune it would cost to replace the boat’s old engines. They were okay for motoring up the Charles River and around the harbor, but I wouldn’t trust them to make it to Nantucket Island or Martha’s Vineyard. I could pay for them with the money I had in my saving account, but I was planning on using that to open another burger hut over on Revere Beach.
I woke in the morning around ten. Lisa was already up and gone. While I’d been sleeping off last night’s beers, she’d made coffee and had headed home to shower and change for work. At least that’s what I figured. One of the benefits of not being a drinker was six hours of sleep and she was up and running. Not me. I’m no morning person. I needed my coffee and breakfast before my grumpy edge softened. By the time I had walked from the marina to the pier for another day behind the counter at Munchies, I was my usual happy self. The sun was up, the sky was blue, and the tourists would be hungry after their tour of the USS Constitution. It was going to be a good day, at least that’s how it looked when I arrived.
Buzz was already there setting out the tables and white plastic chairs. He was one of two Boston University students I’d hired to help me out, and if need be, to run the joint when I wasn’t around. Buzz was a typical kid from the suburbs, baseball cap, khaki shorts, and polo shirt, but he had a sharp eye. He played a game where he’d try to guess what the customer was going to order based on what they looked like. He was right more often than not, but it wasn’t like there was a lot to choose from, Munchie Burgers, Mad Dogs, Tijuana Tacos, barbecued ribs and chicken on the weekends, and assorted sides to go with everything. We did a brisk take out business and we delivered to the various marinas in Charlestown, which was a lifesaver in the winter when the tourist trade slowed.
“Hey, Capt’n,” Buzz said as I walked up. “Did you make contact with any long lost ancestors last night?”
I’d told him of our Ouija board plans. “Nah, it was a flop, unless you think sex on the beach has a different meaning in the spirit world than it does over at the Warren Tavern.”
“You got me. I wouldn’t know. They don’t teach us about that stuff at BU.”
“Really? I wonder why,” I joked, and went inside to prep things for the noontime crowd. But first, I shuffled through the CDs and called out to Buzz, “What are you in the mood for?”
“No Beach Boys. I’ve had that fucking Barbara Anne song stuck in my head since yesterday.”
“Then it’s time for the king of the surf guitar.” I put a couple of Dick Dale CDs in the carousel, hit play and turned it up. Miserlou ripped through the air nice and loud, making me feel like I was back home in the Columbia Gorge, windsurfing the waves.
In the afternoon when things were in full swing and Buzz was flipping burgers on the grill and I was behind the cash register, two townies I recognized as regulars showed up and ordered a couple Tijuana Tacos and “Special Pepsis.” I couldn’t get a liquor license being on the pier and not being an enclosed space, so I sold beer in Pepsi cups to the people I was certain weren’t from the Liquor Board. It was no different than going to Chinatown after serving hours and ordering cold tea in any one of a dozen restaurants. Boston was so full of rules and regulations, excise taxes and permit fees, it was like living with Orwell’s Big Brother riding around on your shoulders. You could barely take a piss without them trying to hold your dick for you. That was what all the Taxachusetts money went to, so if there was a way around it, I’d definitely try it.
And speaking of the devil, that afternoon one of the city’s health inspectors came around and sprung a surprise sanitation check, but he was there for more than that. He was the same guy I’d had to bribe with fifty bucks last summer to overlook the Special Pepsis. That wasn’t his department anyway. I figured he was here for another payoff, so before he’d opened his mouth, I took fifty bucks from the register, folded the bills and palmed them.
“How’s it going there?” he said as he stepped up to the window and looked around. He had a greasy smile and his dentures weren’t seated right. “Looks like business is good.” When we shook hands, he took the money without anyone seeing a thing. I felt like I was paying off a Newbury Street drug dealer, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting any candy. My money quickly disappeared into his pants’ pocket. “It’s going to cost you a little more this year,” he said. “Inflation.”
What a prick. He was getting greedy on me. There was so much graft in Boston, I’m surprised it hadn’t crumbled to the ground long ago like ancient Rome. You could pave the streets with the bribes people were paying just to run their businesses. “It’s nice to see you too,” I said coldly. “How much more?”
He was a short guy with a gut that hung out over his belt. Too much macaroni and cheese. He wore a gray striped polyester tie with a nylon Boston Bruins windbreaker. He was just another cog on the wheel, whose only contribution to the world would be as worm food when he was six feet under. He glanced at Buzz, scratched his eyebrow, then looked back at me. “About five hundred bucks more.”
“You got to be shitting me.”
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay me all at once. How about weekly installments of a hundred bucks,” he said with a smug smile. I wanted to jump across the counter and toss the guy off the pier. “Hey, if not, I can have you shut down within the hour.”
Well, that was that. He held all the high cards. I opened the cash register, took out another fifty and didn’t bother being discreet when I handed it to him. “Thanks a lot, pal,” he said and pocketed the money. “What’s good today?” he asked, looking up at the menu.
Buzz made the sound of hocking up a loogie while flipping the burgers on the grill. “Which one is going to be his, Capt’n?” I laughed. The inspection prick chuckled and walked away. “I hate those fuckers,” Buzz said. “It’s McDonalds poisoning people, not us.”
A hundred dollars poorer, I poured a beer and sat on the back steps to see if I couldn’t figure out a way to get some leverage on the inspection dude. I could threaten him with kicking his ass, but that would be a joke. If I tossed his ass off the pier, he’d shut me down. My best bet was to videotape him taking the payoff, then use that against him. Shit, I was brooding over what was simply the cost of doing business in Charlestown and Boston. I was telling myself this when I overheard heated voices around the corner. My curiosity got the better of me and I moved a little closer to hear better.
“We gotta hit Murphy.”
“Nah, Sal will do what I say.”
“No way, it’s getting too close to risk it. We need to do it and do it now. I’m not going down because Murphy’s getting cold feet.”
I recognized the voices. It was the two townies who’d ordered Special Pepsis. I would rather have not heard what they said, but now that I could hear them, I wasn’t going to walk away.
“All right, we’ll do it your way, tonight before anyone gets suspicious.”
“Now you’re thinking,” the other chimed in. They were talking about killing someone, and I could hear the smiles on their faces. They sounded relieved, like a decision that had been hanging over them had finally been made. I knew this shit went down in Charlestown, I’d read about the shootings in the newspaper, but they were always anonymous faces and places in the projects. If I hung out at the Ninety-Nine next to Johnny’s Foodmaster, I might’ve known more about it. The Ninety-Nine was a restaurant and bar chain that wasn’t much different than a Denny’s, except there was a heavier emphasis on the bar and it had at least ten televisions on at once. No matter where you looked, you could see a Bruins game, or a Pats game, or like now in the summer, a Red Sox game. It was where the townies from the Mishiwam Housing Project went. It had a paranoid atmosphere. I used to pop in there once in a blue moon, but one time the cops showed up en masse, cordoned off the parking lot and sealed up the place.
I was lucky I hadn’t been there. It turned out that a drug meeting inside between five guys had gone bad. In the middle of lunch, one of the guys stood up, pulled a gun and started shooting at the three guys across the table. They didn’t have a chance, he hit them all. Nobody expected a move like that in the middle of a crowded restaurant. The shooter and his partner ran out of the restaurant, but then the shooter came back in and put a bullet into each one at close range execution style. I saw nothing, I had only read about it in the Boston Globe. But now I was overhearing two guys talking about killing someone named Sal or Sal Murphy. Shit, now I really wished I hadn’t heard them. I didn’t want to get involved. Let the dogs fight it out among themselves. Who was I to try to break it up. I wasn’t a fucking townie, just a dumb surfer bum from the Gorge. At most, I was a toonie, someone the townies would say hello to instead of ignoring. I quietly stood up and moved back inside the burger hut. If they lived by the code of silence, I would too. Charlestown was the sort of place where the cops would call a killing a suicide because they knew if they went to investigate, they’d hit a brick wall of silence. Well, I’d be just one more brick among many in that wall.
Later that afternoon, an evening thunderstorm crossed the Berkshires and moved over Boston, sending the tourists running for shelter back in their hotels, so I decided to close up early. “Buzz, you want the rest of the day off?” I asked.
“Sure, I could use the extra time. I’ve a paper for that summer lit. class I’m taking.”
“What on?”
“Ethan Frome.”
“Lucky you. I’d rather be learning about horny ghosts than reading that torturous book.”
“Tell me about it, but I need the English credits.”
“Get on the Internet and buy a paper.”
After Buzz took off, I stacked the chairs and tables, ran a cable through their legs and locked them to the burger hut. I cleaned up inside, locked the shutters and started toward home, when it started to rain. The thought of holing up inside my boat with all the windows shut against the weather sounded pretty gloomy, so I opted instead for a walk to the bank to deposit what was left of the day’s earnings after paying the bribe. I looked at the faces of the people I passed, wondering if any of them were Sal Murphy. There was going to be one less person in Charlestown after tonight, and knowing that was really messing with my head, so I slipped into the Warren Tavern and used their white pages. There were lots of S. Murphy’s, but only one Sal Murphy in Charlestown, and it wasn’t Sal, but Sally. I ran the conversation through my head again, and they could’ve as easily been talking about a woman as a man. I had just assumed it would be a guy. I dropped a quarter in the pay phone and dialed the number. A recorded voice answered, saying the telephone server was temporarily not functioning. It was the number to one of those new digital cell phones that couldn’t be listened in on, and she must’ve been in a bad zone or something. I hung up and looked over the crowd in the tavern. It was full of tourists escaping the rain, and I recognized a few I’d fed earlier in the day.
I continued on to the bank, deposited the money, then resigned myself to going back to the boat. As I passed O’Donnell’s Pub, I decided to try the number again and stepped inside. O’Donnell’s was long and narrow, darkly lit with Irish tunes playing on the jukebox. It had an old-timer crowd during the day, old men with nothing to do but drink to pass the last years of their lives. I occasionally went there on Sunday nights after everyone had been to church. They’d repented, and now it was time to sin again. The pay phone was by the door in the entry area separated from the bar by a glass window. As I dropped another quarter and dialed her number, I looked through the window at the people sitting in the booths that lined the length of the wall facing the bar. As it started ringing, I froze. Sitting in one of the booths were the two townies I'd seen at lunch, and with them was a chick I recognized from around Charlestown. I’d seen her a few times in Johnny’s Foodmaster, and we always caught eyes. She was tall, with black hair, and crisp Irish blue eyes. On the second ring, she answered.
I watched her take her cell phone out of her pocket, open it and say, “Hello?” I didn’t know what to say, I hadn’t thought it through.
“Hello?” she said again.
“Uh, you don’t know me, but there’s something you need to know,” I stumbled on. “I overheard the two guys you’re with talking about killing someone.” She looked over at the pay phone and directly at me. She was quick. I dropped my head and turned my back to her. I was going to help her out, but I didn’t want to be recognized. “They were talking about someone named Sal, or Murphy.” I glanced over my shoulder and caught the look in her eyes. It wasn’t fear or panic, but cold, calculated survival. She turned her phone off and put it back into her pocket, then stood and excused herself to the bathroom. I pretended to be on the phone a moment longer, then hung up and got the hell out of there. I’d done my bit, now it was her turn to run.
That night, Lisa called and talked me into going clubbing with her, something I didn’t do very often. She was into the “scene,” following the euro crowd from club to club depending on what night of the week it was. She rationalized being a social butterfly by claiming that when she opened up her own place, a thousand people would show up, all of them her friends, and like most things she said, she was probably right. I agreed to go with her, but not for the reasons she assumed. I needed diversion to get my mind off of Charlestown and its brutal ways. I was a West Coast softy inside, and though I’d been out east for over six years, I still found easterners’ coldness shocking at times. The dense urban living gave them hearts with an icy freeze switch. Say the wrong thing and they’d ice you out. They compartmentalized their lives. If there was something they didn’t want to deal with, they put on their blinders and didn’t see it. Lisa was that way, so were Evan and Samantha, and it was rubbing off on me.
I took a cab downtown and met Lisa at Diva’s. She was sitting at the bar watching the place run itself. She’d done a good job of getting the joint in order since taking over a year ago. Efficient was her middle name.
I leaned against the bar and kissed her hello.
“Hey, you got down here fast,” she said. “You sure your boat won’t sink in this rain?”
I didn’t answer. Sometimes she knew just what buttons to push that made me want to go check my mooring lines.
“I’m sorry,” she said and looped her arm through mine. “I was just kidding. Have you had dinner yet?” I shook my head. “Good, because I already ordered for you. Some fresh Tiger Shark came in today that I want you to try. You should sell shark burgers at your place. They’d be a big hit.”
“Sounds tasty.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
I ordered myself a drink, hoping it would make me feel more talkative than I did. I tended to clam up under stress, and after last night with her, I didn’t want her to catch on that anything was wrong. I filled the conversational space with questions about her day, and when it was my turn to tell, I told her about bribing the health inspector and Buzz’s response when the prick asked what was good to eat. She laughed. She’d dealt with those bastards before, but being a Back Bay restaurant, the bribes she had to pay were sufficiently larger. My hundred a week would be five for her.
We ate at the bar so we wouldn’t take up any of that lucrative table space down in the restaurant section. She was queen bee, and knew everyone. Some she introduced to me, some I already knew, others she said a perfunctorily hello to and then ignored. There was a social pecking order that I found difficult to follow. Hip seemed to take precedence over the obviously wealthy, but it took a lot of money to hobnob in places like Diva’s every night of the week, so the casual dude could easily be an understated rich dude. It just depended on how often you saw him out and where. It was also hard to know without knowing the catch phrases that tagged people in their various categories.
Since Lisa worked nights and I days, we really only saw one another on her days off, but I could always fix it with Buzz to be off the same days. When she was in a good mood, sometimes she’d surprise me and stop by Munchies during the day to hang out and get fed the food of pagans instead of that religiously coutured cuisine they served up at Diva’s. When the Tiger Shark steaks showed up, I looked at my plate and then hers. She’d obviously told the chef to double the regular portion for me. I smiled at her and said thanks. She was considerate in that way, but she also enjoyed flexing the perks of her job. “Well, what do you think?” she asked.
I cut into it and took a bite. It was heavier tasting than regular fish, almost chicken-like. “You’re right, this is good.”
As we were eating, two of her friends walked in the bar in a huff, scanned the faces, spotted Lisa, and came over. They were young women, dressed in the fashion of Newbury Street, crushed black velvet and lots of cleavage. I’d seen them before. One I’d met, Angela. She was the owner of one of the boutiques Lisa modeled for as a favor. “Mmm, that looks good. Can I try it?” she asked, not waiting for an answer before opening her mouth wide.
“Of course,” Lisa answered, skewered a bite on her fork while Angela swooped down on it like a starving bird. She had an exceptionally large mouth that was always working on something, a cigarette, the straw from her drink, a pen. She loved Bloody Marys because of their celery stalks. Don’t get me wrong, I liked her. She was always up front about what she thought and was easy to deal with. I thought she’d get a lot of oral pleasure if she took up cigar smoking. She was pretty enough to get away with it, all of Lisa’s girlfriends were.
The other woman seemed to be more of a friend of Angela’s than of Lisa’s. I forgot her name the moment I was introduced to her. Not on purpose, she was just like so many other women who floated about in Lisa’s scene. As the women talked, I returned to my food, and it wasn’t long before I’d tuned out my entire surroundings and was running the Charlestown events through my head again, wondering if Sally Murphy had made it into hiding, or was headed south on I-95 out of Massachusetts. I was thinking of her as a wounded bird in need of help. I had a vulnerability for that type I’d thought I’d left behind when I started dating Lisa, but I guess I hadn’t. I was still a sorry ass romantic.
“Sean, Sean, where have you been?” Lisa asked, breaking in on my world. “You’ve been staring off into space like you were stoned or something.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to zone out.”
“Angela was talking to you.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“Tell me about it,” Angela said. “Nobody but high maintenance chicks came into the store today, and the cabdriver we had coming down here hit on us. He said driving a cab was just a hobby, like he was some famous actor researching a role. Yeah right.” Her eyes zeroed in on my plate. I’d pushed it away, half eaten. “Are you going to finish that?”
“God Angela,” Lisa said. “I’ll have the kitchen fix you up a plate if you want.”
“Would you? You’re so sweet. I haven’t eaten a thing all day except for half a bagel with fat free cream cheese for lunch.”
The four of us went to Club Nicole that night. The crowd there was mostly euros and middle easterners. If I was a bigot, I’d call them eurotrash and ragheads, but if there’s anything I learned from owning Munchies, it was that people were pretty much the same all over the world, they just came in different flavors. Club Nicole sold a lot of expensive champagne, and everyone smoked incessantly, like they were posing for a Japanese cigarette ad. The music was loud techno with a beat like a nervous leg swinger, making conversation a pain, but I didn’t really mind. I thought I could use it as an excuse not to socialize, but I should’ve known better.
Upon entering the club, Lisa and her friends scattered to chat up the scene. There were lots of cheek to cheek air kisses to be kissed. In Club Nicole, if you weren’t euro, you were a wannabe euro. I took the opportunity to slip away and found a place to hole up at the bar. The drinks I’d had at Diva’s had made me far from talkative. I was still brooding on Sally Murphy, and irrationally felt like I should be roaming the streets of Charlestown in case something happened. I’d even started making up scenarios like if I’d stayed in O’Donnell’s Pub after my clandestine phone call to her. I’d wait for them to leave, then follow them. Or I’d go over to their booth, introduce myself and join them. Then later, she would leave with me, safe, unhurt, and very sexy. She was like the forbidden fruit from the other side of the tracks. Not that I was from one side or the other, Hood River had tracks, but they ran along the river’s edge, so there was nothing on the other side except water and windsurfers.
I wanted to slip out and go home, and was considering it, though I knew I’d draw a lot of flack from Lisa if I did. But it wasn’t going to matter. Lisa found me at the bar and walked up to me shaking her head with pursed, angry lips. Her lips could go from doing amazing things like last night, to being pinched like those of a catholic nun in an all girls’ high school. “What is with you?” she snapped. “What’s with the superior attitude tonight? Don’t you like my friends?”
Like most people, no matter how beautiful or confident, Lisa had an insecure streak, and hers surfaced when people didn’t join in on her chosen activity. If you didn’t feel like chatting up the room when she did, she took it personally like you were looking down on her for doing it. For her, if you were at a restaurant, you were supposed to act a certain way, and when at a club, another way, both of which were dictated by her lead. There was no room for other people’s opinions or moods. When you were out and about, you had to be up and peppy, no matter what.
I leaned close to her to fight the loud music. “Sorry. Maybe I should head home.”
“Yeah, maybe you should if you’re going to cop this superior attitude shit. I hate it when you get this way.”
“I’m not being superior.”
“Whatever,” she said, shaking her head. “Go home if you’re going to bring everyone down.”
I was fucked, caught in a Catch-22. If I shared with her why I was brooding, she’d get on my case for getting involved in something she’d never touch, and I was catching it for holding back. I was slipping into a “Who cares?” mood, and her needling me wasn’t helping. “You don’t have to be this way,” I said.
“Be this way? Who’s the one with the attitude?”
This was going nowhere. I was getting angry, and she was getting angrier. Soon we’d both say things we’d regret. I pushed my stool away from the bar and slid off. With a forced smile, I said, “I’m going to take off. I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah, go see if your boat’s sunk yet.”
This time I shook my head at her, copping her superior attitude as my own, and walked out. I was steamed, frustrated. I said I no longer acted to play a part. Now I was thinking that was bullshit. By being silent, I was acting. By not trusting Lisa, I was acting. I should’ve told her. Hell, she might’ve even agreed with me. What did I know.
The next day I woke feeling emotionally ragged. When I remembered last night’s stupid fight with Lisa at Club Nicole, I realized why. I wasn’t like some guys who got off on fighting, who used bossing women around as a way to define themselves. If I could avoid a fight, I would, and I’d been pretty successful when it came to barroom brawls. My trouble came when I was in emotional territory where people had unspoken agendas and desires. That’s always where it flared up with Lisa and I. I knew better than to have gone clubbing with her and her friends. That hadn’t been the first time we’d had a spat in a euro club. If I’d wanted diversion, I should’ve called up Evan and volunteered to baby-sit their two kids for them. It was hard to think about anything when I was around those two little monsters.
Their boy was six. His name was David, and he’d throw a sugar fueled fit if you called him Davie. Their girl was eight. Her name was Patricia, but I called her Pat Nixon because she’d recently announced to everyone that she was going to be a governor’s wife. She’d given up playing with her dolls, and instead carried Evan’s Wall Street Journal under her arm and started everything she said with, “Well, my husband the governor says that...” I didn’t have a clue where she’d picked up this stuff. Where did any of us? When I was little, we had a carpenter at the house for a while to build a deck. My sister would hangout with him all day, watching every little detail. He had a habit of swearing when something didn’t work out, like if he’d cut a board too short. Well, one time when we were out to dinner in a restaurant, a piece of food fell off my sister’s fork, and real loud, she said, “Goddamn it!” Everyone in the restaurant turned to look at this little girl with the dirty mouth. My parents were fresh out of the sixties, and they started laughing, but it took them a while to figure out where she’d learned it.
I got out of bed, showered and dressed, then set up the coffee machine and turned it on. While I waited for my morning caffeine hit, I walked up the dock to get a Globe out of the news box. Last night’s rain had cleaned the air of the usual urban dirt, leaving a musky morning smell hanging over the marina. As I dropped a couple quarters into the news box, one of my neighbors, Jack, stepped off his boat onto the dock and stretched his arms. He saw me getting a paper out of the news box and started trotting up the gangway toward me. “Sean, hold up there, don’t close it.”
I reached in and took out a second paper.
“Thanks,” he said as I handed it to him. “I used up all my change doing laundry last night.”
“That’s what I should’ve done last night.”
“Naw, wait until you’re my age to start killing your Friday nights in front of the television.” Jack was in his fifties, recently divorced, and had yet to venture out into the dating world again. His wife got the house, and he the sailboat that couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet long. Living in it must’ve been like living in a cigar tube with a sleeping berth and camp stove. The astronauts on the Russian space station Mir had it better.
“Have you had your coffee yet?” I asked. “I have some brewing back on my boat.”
“Thanks, but my doctor has ordered me off coffee because of my cholesterol levels.”
“Bummer.”
“You’re telling me. In a year, they’ll be saying coffee is good for your cholesterol. Eggs used to be bad, now they’re good, same goes for butter.”
We started back down the gangway to the dock. “If you’re around, stop by Munchies for lunch. I’ll serve you up something that’ll flush out your arteries.”
I walked back to my boat, poured a cup of coffee and glanced through the headlines on the front page. Dead center were mug shots of the two townies I’d overheard the day before. Shit, they killed the girl and got caught, I thought. I scanned the article and was totally wrong. I read, “Early Saturday morning around three AM, two Charlestown men were brutally gunned down in a shoot out in the Mishiwam Housing Project on Charlestown’s main street. Police are investigating, but say they have no suspects.” I didn’t need to read any further. I’d saved one, but killed two. She was just like them. What had I been thinking. I should’ve stayed out of it and let them fight it out. But no, I had to be the romantic sap and try to be a hero. That girl had no need of heroes. Fuck, for all I knew, I was next on her list.
I was hit with the panic urge to run. I could hold my own in a fight, but when it came to guns it was all over, and it didn’t matter which sex was behind the trigger. Man or woman, both could as easily squeeze it. Though kids are usually more afraid of their fathers because he’s the one who does the spanking, it’s the mother who stands behind him. I remember never being afraid of my mom’s spankings because they didn’t hurt, but when she threatened to have my father spank me when he got home, I’d shut right up. Whatever those spankings had taught me weren’t going to help me now. I was probably the only person who could tie Sally Murphy to the shootings in the paper. I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe not, I thought. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, a wake up call saying it was time to move on.
I thumbed through the phone book and found the number to J&M’s, the engine dealer I’d talked to about putting new engines in the boat. I dialed them up and was in luck. If I brought the boat in that morning, they could get to work on it right away. I guessed most people had their engine work done during the winter. Well, there went my savings for the second Munchies on Revere Beach. Next I called Buzz and told him to take care of the store and that I’d be in late. He sounded happy, like now he wouldn’t have to listen to my surf music all day. Nope, it would be Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots rumbling through the customers’ ears.
When I turned the ignition key, the boat’s engines coughed smoke. It had been a while since I’d fired them up. I let them idle as I unplugged the dock power and water feeds and phone line, then untied the mooring lines. From the fly bridge where I could see better, I eased her away from the dock. The engine dealer was over in East Boston, not far away, about fifteen minutes without pushing the old engines too hard. Taking the boat there was like going to the doctor. It made me nervous. I worried they were going to tell me something unexpected was wrong with the boat, like the keel was rotted or it had cancer.
I tied up to the dock in back of J&M’s, and walked up to their office. They didn’t have a receptionist or a secretary, just a bunch of guys in greasy overalls. It was a low overhead operation that broke most of the rules. They were just my style. They worked faster and charged less than the places that focused on platinum and gold cards. I walked around the desk and pushed through the shop door. It was a small warehouse with several boats suspended in the air by heavy lifters. There was the noise of mechanics at work, but I didn’t see anyone. Unlike a car where you work on it from the outside, you had to climb inside a boat to get at what you needed to fix.
“Hello? Anyone home?” I called out.
A bald head appeared above the rail of one of the boats. “You the guy who called with the Chris Craft?”
“Yeah, it’s tied up out back.”
“Leave the keys on the desk. If everything goes smooth, we should have it for you tomorrow. Those old Chris Crafts are easy. If you pay cash, we’ll knock off ten percent.”
Now I really liked these guys. “Cool, cash it is, and lunch is on me. Have you ever eaten at Munchies in Charlestown?”
“Yeah, a couple of times.”
“I own the joint. You should motor over for lunch.”
The bald guy smirked. “I would, but I’m afraid of the water. Don’t say it. I know.” He stroked his head. “I can’t even swim.”
“No worry. I’ll leave the phone number with the keys. Call in with what you want and I or one of my boys will drop it off in the skiff.”
“Thanks, man. We’ll take extra care of your boat.”
I ducked out of there and walked up to the main street to find a cab. For the next day, I was homeless. I guessed I could try to smooth things over with Lisa and stay there. I was going to have to break the ice with her at some point because it was unlikely that she would take the initiative. Whenever we had one of these spats, I always had to make the first move toward reconciliation. She was too headstrong to be the first to admit to being even partially at fault. That was my job, weaving my way through her emotional minefield. I wished Lisa had a sister or someone I could talk to who could act as a minesweeper, but she didn’t, and her friends were as tight lipped as she was.
I didn’t get to Munchies until early in the afternoon. I couldn’t find a cab and ended up walking to the nearest T station and taking the Blue Line into town, and then transferring to the Orange Line to get back to Charlestown. When I finally showed up at Munchies, I’d been right about the music. Pearl Jam was stoked on the outdoor speakers.
“Hey, Capt’n, get your boat taken care of?” Buzz asked as I stepped into the burger hut.
“Yeah. Those guys call in their order yet?”
“I sent Skid over in the skiff with it. He should be back anytime now,” he said. “A chick came by earlier looking for you, a real looker. She said she’d stop by again later.”
“Did she have black hair and a Charlietown accent?” I asked, hoping he answered no.
“Yep, that’s her. You still seeing Lisa?” he asked. Buzz loved Lisa. All guys did. How could they not love a tall lanky blonde? We were taught that types like her were the ideal. It’s the women who Lisa had trouble getting along with. When they saw how much attention she got from the guys, the catfight competitive streak would surface. I wasn’t a real jealous type, but sometimes it got on my nerves. I’d be talking to her in Diva’s, and she’d turn to flirt with some guy friend of hers who said hello to her. I couldn’t get mad about it. Light flirting was part of her job requirement. She didn’t do it when we weren’t in Diva’s or around the euro scene. When she stopped by Munchies, she’d joke around with Buzz, but she treated him more like a kid brother than a flirting partner.
“Yeah, I’m still seeing her,” I said. “The black haired chick isn’t a romantic thing. I don’t know what she wants.” And I didn’t. I doubted if she saw me as a threat if she was coming around Munchies openly looking for me. Maybe she came by to feel me out to see where I stood. The answer to that was pretty obvious. “Did she say when she’d be coming by again?”
“Nope. She bought a soda and split.”
I looked over the customers seated around the white plastic tables. The lunch rush was over. “Do you think you can manage the rest of the day without me?”
“Sure. I’ll put Skid to work in here once he gets back. Why? What’s up?”
Buzz worked for me, but he was also a pal. We’d spent enough hours cooped in the burger hut together to share our stories. “I had a spat with Lisa last night I need to clear up.”
“No problem, Capt’n, I can manage.”
“Thanks Buzz.” I wanted to smooth things out with Lisa, but mostly I wanted to dodge dealing with the black haired chick. I hoped if I could avoid her long enough, the whole thing would blow over. Out of sight, out of mind was my motto, and I was wishing it was hers too, but that didn’t seem likely. She’d be the determined sort, keeping after me until we finally met up. But maybe I had it all wrong. It was possible those two townie dudes were caught up in some other scam that went sour and she’d had nothing to do with what happened. Hey, it was Charlestown, the bank robber capital of the world. It used to house the state prison, a granite fortress built in the last century like those in the Old World. They tore it down in the mid sixties and built Bunker Hill Community Collage in its place, but you can imagine how a century of a prison looming over a neighborhood would affect it, especially an Irish one that had a problem with authority. Charlestown was like that, a tough little neighborhood. It took more than a year after I’d moved there before the townies would say hello to me. You could be in the Warren Tavern, and they’d snub you if they didn’t know who you were and where you fit in. It was a square mile where everybody knew who were townies and who were outsiders, and the two didn’t mix much. Opening up Munchies helped break the ice for me. They could place me. But what really did it was selling the Special Pepsis. That put me on the in because I was breaking the rules like a good Charlietown boy was expected to.
I walked over to City Square, thinking I might grab a cab in front of Olive’s, a yuppie restaurant that packed in the bridge and tunnel crowd six nights a week, but Rutheford Ave. was backed up with early rush hour traffic, so I had to take the T again. I walked across the Charlestown Bridge to the North End, passing a half dozen kids leaning over the rail fishing in the harbor. Personally, I wouldn’t eat fish out of the harbor. If it wasn’t clean enough to swim in, I doubted it was safe to eat from. I got on the Green Line across from where they were tearing down the Boston Garden.
The North End was a nightmare of construction, closed sidewalks, and traffic reroutings caused by the Big Dig. The Big Dig was what the Central Artery and Third Harbor Tunnel project was nicknamed. They were digging a freeway tunnel through downtown Boston, and it was the largest construction scheme in the nation's history. The cost had started at two point six billion, and had been expected to be completed last year, but now the cost was at eleven point six billion and wasn’t supposed to be finished until 2004 or later. It would be later, and cost more. Buzz and I had a bet going as to what the final cost would be. He said fifteen billion, I said twenty billion. The opportunities for corrupt profits must’ve made those involved cream their jeans. That was Boston for you, notoriously corrupt.
I got off the T at Copley Square, next to the public library, and walked the few blocks to Diva’s. The sidewalk café out front was crowded with those who had nothing better to do with their afternoons than spend it shopping on Newbury Street, a half-mile stretch of posh shops like Chanel, Armani, Versace, etcetera. The street was always good for some entertaining people watching. Sometimes after going for a long bicycle ride up the Charles River, I’d find a nice spot on Newbury to sip a soda and enjoy some free entertainment. Watching the people pass by was like watching people audition for a play. Most everyone was trying their damnedest to look like they were too aloof to care about a single worldly thing, and the scary thing was that some of them probably were. They were pushing the bubble when it came to superficiality. Sure I laughed at it, but I jumped on board every now and then. If Lisa had her druthers, I’d be on board a lot more often, but I found it easier to play that game away from her than with her. On the rare occasion when Evan and I would go out without the women, it was easy to fall into it. We’d go to some trendy restaurant downtown and shoot the shit at the bar for a while, but always end up small talking with the chicks just for the hell of it. Nothing ever happened, at least not since I’d started dating Lisa. Actually, that’s how I met her. Evan and I popped into Diva’s one night, and after I met her, I started dropping in pretty often until I finally asked her out. That seemed like a lifetime ago. I could still handle Diva’s back then. Now the place got on my nerves after twenty minutes, and sooner if certain people were there who I couldn’t stand.