The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [2]
From now on, thought Bobby, he'd have as many fucking parker rolls as he wanted.
Then he passed out.
Bobby Gold, in a red-and-white Dead Boys T-shirt, blue jeans, and high-top Nikes, stepped through the high electrified fence at the perimeter of the prison. It was February, and he was freezing. He looked around to see if anyone had come to meet him, but there was no one. Lisa hadn't written him, so she sure as hell wasn't coming. His parents had turned their backs on him forever.
Where was Eddie?
BOBBY AT WORK
Bobby Gold, six foot four and dripping wet, squeezed past an outgoing delivery of Norwegian salmon and stood motionless, smelling of soggy leather, in the cramped front room of Jay Bee Seafood Company, taking up space. Men in galoshes, leather weight-belts and insulated vests jockeyed heavily loaded hand-trucks around him. No one asked him to move.
Everybody smoked — their wet cigarettes held in gloved hands with the tips cut down. Men ticked off items on crumpled invoices with pencil stubs, stacked leaking crates of flounder, mussels, cod, squid, and lobster, swept crushed ice into melting piles on the waterlogged wooden floor. At an ancient desk by the front window, a fat man with a pen behind his ear was making conciliatory noises into the phone, blowing smoke.
"Yeah . . . yeah . . . we'll take it back. Yeah . . . I know . . . the dispatcher missed it. Whaddya want me to do? What can I say? I'll send you another piece — no problem. Yeah . . . right away . . . center-cut. I got it. Right . . . right. It's leaving right now."
When he hung up, the fat man called back to somebody in the rear. "Send twenny pounds of c.c. sword up to Sullivan's! And bring back what he's got!" Then he looked up, noticed the large figure in the fingertip-length black leather jacket, black pullover, black denim pants and black cowboy boots, obstructing commerce in his loading area.
"Yo! . . . Johnny Cash! Can I help you with something?"
"I come from Eddie," said Bobby Gold, his voice flat, no expression on his face.
The fat man at the desk rolled his eyes, took a deep hit on a bent Pall Mall and jerked a thumb towards the rear. "He's in the back office."
Bobby pushed aside long plastic curtains that kept the cold from escaping a cavernous, refrigerated work area. Salsa music was blaring from a portable radio at one of six long worktables where more men in long white coats smeared with fish blood packed seafood into crates and covered it with ice. But the dominant sound here was a relentless droning from the giant compressors that kept the room chilled down to a frosty thirty-eight degrees. They were gutting red snappers around a central floor drain, and there were fish scales everywhere — like snowflakes in the workers' hair, clinging to their knives, on their clothing. Black and purple entrails were being pulled from the fishes' underbellies, then tossed carelessly into fifty-five-gallon slop buckets. Against one wall, a triple stacked row of grouper seemed to follow Bobby's progress across the room with clear, shiny eyes, their bodies still twisted with rigor.
Another room: white tile, with a bored-looking old man working a hose while another picked over littleneck clams and packed them into burlap. Bobby's boot crushed a clam shell as he swept through a second set of plastic curtains and into the rear offices. Two bull-necked women with door-knocker-sized earrings and bad hair sat talking on phones by a prehistoric safe, a sleeping Rottweiler between them. Bobby opened Jerry Moss's door without knocking and went inside.
"Oh, shit," said Jerry, a sun-freckled old man, hunched over a pile of price quotes and bills of lading.
"Hi, Jer'," said Bobby, sad already. The old man looked particularly tired and weak today — as if a good wind could