Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [4]
“Listen, just tell me where the key is and I’ll take you home like I said,” he pleads.
I reach in my purse to take out my pepper spray. He lunges forward, and, for a second, I think maybe he’s going to kiss me. He takes my face in both of his hands and whacks my head hard on the dashboard. Then it’s lights out.
I wake up to the tickle of something licking my ankle. I’m sitting on a cushioned chair with my hands tied behind my back, feet bound together by what looks like a dog leash, and duct tape covering my mouth. The something washing my foot is a fat brown dog, one of those pugs with the curly tails and popped-out eyes. It wears a fancy pink collar. I jerk my leg. The dog looks up at me, eyes rolling stupidly and blackish tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth.
At least my clothes are still on; all except for my shoes.
I struggle against the ties and look around. I’ve descended into the middle of South Philly grandmother-land. My best guess is that it’s Tony’s mom’s house. It’s an old-school Italian living room with thick, pink shag carpet, a blue leather sofa and matching armchair covered in plastic. The surfaces are decorated with doilies and throw pillows with fluffy white kittens stitched in needlepoint, along with afghans, Virgin Marys, and multiple Jesuses—Jesus and a lamb, Jesus on the cross, Jesus flashing the peace sign and looking like a hipster. The best is a picture featuring the holiest of holy—Jesus, John F. Kennedy, and Pope John Paul II. How they got the three of them together for that photo op is anybody’s guess. Underneath it all is the trapped-in smell of old lady. Part Jean Naté body wash, part pancake makeup, and part getting closer to death. No wonder Johnny never brought me here. He had mentioned he was crashing at his gran’s for a while, but didn’t say he was living with an old-fashioned stereo as big as a spaceship, giant fake flowers in an even bigger shiny vase, and a crappy oil painting of the family hanging in a gold frame above the couch: Grandma, Tony, and Johnny. Another unholy trinity.
I’ve got to make sense of this somehow before the lunatic returns. I am starting to recall a little bit more about Johnny.
I don’t usually chat up customers, but Wednesdays are slow at Ray’s. He wore low-slung jeans and a white T-shirt that stretched tight across the muscles of his chest and back. I was new to the joint—the first female bartender, but I didn’t need to prove myself. Lou, Ray’s son, was a friend of my dad’s. I just wanted a job where I could get paid in cash and stay off the radar of the IRS for a while.
He looked just like all the white, angst-filled hipster dudes you see there or at the Dive or Pope’s—in their grungy T-shirts from Circle Thrift and skinny girl jeans with one leg rolled up so that they can get around the city on their beat-up, expensive vintage bikes. Chain wallets, ironic tattoos, and multiple piercings. I can’t say that he was any different, except he said “please” and “thank you” when I set the PBRs in front of him and he was writing in a red spiral notebook—like the kind you’d use in high school. His wrote feverishly and I imagined it was a screenplay about a misunderstood twenty-something, or a proposal to City Council for a more sustainable Philly, or song lyrics for his Flaming Lips sound-alike band so that they could get another gig at Johnny Brenda’s.
We started talking about what he was writing. He had a rough voice, the voice of a smoker who’d picked up the habit with a vengeance in junior high, though he couldn’t have been too far into his twenties.
He told me he’d always kept a journal. “I know, I’m a pretentious prick. No poetry though,” he added. I asked him what he wrote about. “Deep, dark secrets,” he said. He didn’t look like he’d lived long enough to have anything