Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [53]
I washed my face in the sink and used the water to smooth down my hair, which helped some but did nothing about my expression. I went into a stall and sat down on the bowl, although not for the usual reason. The men’s room in your average American mall is hardly the best place for meditating, and the smell of shit does not entice the spirit, but it was as close to an ashram as I was going to find. I shut my eyes and got my breathing under control until my heart rate was the only sound in the universe. Being tired helped, and I nearly fell asleep, but I managed to get to the place where I was floating, where the world was gone. I stayed there for ten minutes, coming out of it only when a man let himself into the stall next to mine and began farting like a Gatling gun. I looked in the mirror before I left and was pleased to see that the animal sheen had died down a bit.
I needed a glass of bourbon to brace me, but I had to settle for a pair of very thin hamburgers, some fries, and a small Pepsi. I counted out the change with the patience of a man about to be broke. I took the tray of food, sat at a small table fastened to the wall, and ate while watching the entrance with all the intensity of the fugitive I had become. A skinny black kid with his pants hanging half off his ass went by me. I read the front of his T-shirt as he approached and the back as he was going away. The front of the shirt said KILL ALL THE WHITE PEOPLE. The back said BUT BUY MY CD FIRST. Maybe it was the mood I was in, but I started laughing. In fact, I laughed a little bit too much, so much so that I started to worry about myself, as though I were both lunatic and attending physician. It was worth the worry, though, because by the time I’d stopped chuckling in my little corner, it had come to me who it was I needed to call for help.
There are people you call when you’re in trouble and people you call when the trouble involves the police. The Sheik would have come or sent someone in five minutes, but he was on his way to the Bahamas on his private jet. I might have called Johnny Bingo, a Seminole Indian with his own helicopter, but I hadn’t seen or heard from him in two years, besides which I didn’t have his private number on permanent file in my brain. That left the Space Man. It was his T-shirt the teenager in the food court had been wearing.
I wasted money calling his house, but then the numbers to his cell phone rolled up in front of my eyes. I knew I had them right, except that the sequence of the last two digits wouldn’t stay still in my head. It was either 46 or 64, and both looked equally right and equally wrong, so I spun the wheel and dialed the first pair. The phone rang ten times, and I was an inch away from hanging up when a voice out of an oaken barrel answered.
“Yo,” the voice said. It was not a query but a statement.
“I need to speak with the Space Man.”
“For what?”
“Business.”
“Are you white?”
“Yes. Hank, is that you?”
“It might be.”
“Hank, Space, come on, man, would you cut the crap for a second? It’s me, Jack. I need your help.”
“Unless your last name is Daniels, I don’t know you.”
“Come on, man,” I said. “It’s me, Jack, Jack Vaughn. You know, trainer to the stars.”
There was a pause. “Jack, man! What’s up? I thought you was one of my damned fool accountants bothering me about some credit-card shit. I should have known it was you, bro. Not too many white dudes got this number, you hear what I’m saying?”
He was referring to the fact that he had two cell-phone numbers, one for black people and one for white people, the latter being mainly business acquaintances. In the electronic age, apartheid has many forms, and his was easier to understand than most. Somehow I had become part of that small, elite group of white people entrusted with the black number. I’d been made to understand that it was an honor being bestowed on me, and I had taken it as such, especially since the only other Caucasians who had it were a couple of strippers, both of whom were a lot better-looking than I was.
“I need a lift,” I told him. “I’m in