The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [25]
If she'd gotten him in the sack, she'd have known. Another vain, body-worshiping jerk, in love with his own reflection? She didn't think so. He wasn't a cook. There wouldn't have been the bluster, the cynicism. The false bravado, the endless talk about dick dick dick. No smell of garlic and seafood, no corn starch caked under his balls - none of that towel-snapping, jock-like, locker room mindset that Nikki now lived and breathed, it felt sometimes, with every pore and atom.
For the first time in six months, she thought, I put on a skirt. Do my nails. Wax my fucking pussy - and then I pass out.
She wriggled out of her clothes and lay face down on the bed for a while. She had to be at work in three hours. In three hours, she'd have to put on those scratchy poly-blend kitchen whites again, the damp, food-spattered clogs, she'd pick up her knife roll and walk down the long flight of steps to the kitchen and the noise and the boys who loved her but would never understand her . . . the endless, relentless flow of incoming orders, the soul destroying . . . stupidity of it all.
What would Bobby say when he saw her again? What would she say?
She had to get out of this someday. She needed a plan. She thought, for the first time, about what Lenny had been talking about a few days ago in the walk-in. His latest, knuckleheaded get-rich-quick scheme. For a few seconds, Nikki pictured herself on a Caribbean beach, in a bathing suit. A tall umbrella drink in her hand. No burn marks on her wrists. Where would she live in such a place? And with whom? She couldn't picture a house. Or a person.
When she found she was wearing earrings, she hurled them against the wall and started crying again.
Then she did something she'd never done even once in her entire career.
She picked up the phone and called in sick.
BOBBY GETS BLUE
Bobby Gold, in a blue funk, sat slouched back deep in the stained couch, one leg slung over a torn armrest, drinking vodka. Timmy Moon, behind the stick, washed glasses and hummed along to Junior Walker on the jukebox, ignoring the sole customer at the bar — a fastidiously dressed old man in an ancient suit, currently snoring into a puddle of beer. There were two gum-ball machines in the corner, leased, Bobby knew, from Metro Vending — Eddie's company. A joker-poker machine blipped and clicked and beeped against the far wall under the chain-link-fenced piece of glass that had once been a picture window. No one had been able to see through the grime-encrusted square for decades. The poker machine, occupied at this moment by a pencil-necked building super named George, was also Eddie's (Magic Carpet Entertainment Inc.) as was the cigarette machine near Bobby, and the condom machine in the bathroom. Bobby had once joked with Eddie about the condom machine, pointing out that "no one at Timmy's has had an erection for years." The beer in the taps was from a distrubutor associated with Tommy Victory (dba Zenith Distributors), and the vodka Bobby was drinking — what was it — his sixth, seventh? — was from Xanadu Beverage Inc. — also Eddie's - in partnership with Tommy, of course.
Timmy, now lighting another Parliament from the end of its predecessor, did the occasional work for Tommy V — as he had for Tommy's father before him. Part of a long and glorious tradition of murder-for-hire going back three generations of Moons. Timmy's son, James, Bobby had recently heard, had been arrested for menacing and possession of a handgun. Bobby remembered seeing James, only a few years earlier, hanging out with his friends on the corner, skateboards and baggy pants and new, white sneakers, wool caps pulled down low over their eyes, in conscious emulation of Latino prison gangs Bobby knew only too well.
The music changed to U2, a development as predictable as the over-aerated Guinness in Timmy's taps, or the wet mass of toilet paper clogging Timmy's toilets, or the inescapable outcome of