Losing Joe's Place

  Rootbeer’s new hedge against executive burnout was rock polishing, which was not as bad as the harp, but ten times worse than stamps. He had bought one of those polishing wheels, and not a toy, either. It was the kind jewelers use to finish diamonds, and it must have cost a fortune. Where had he gotten the money? We had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with a Toronto Star headline that read: Man Uproots Telephone Pole. Especially since I spent that night digging splinters out of Rootbeer’s hamlike hands. But our hero refused to discuss financial matters, as it could only lead to stress, and we all knew what that led to.

  My own career as the new Plotnick was keeping me pretty busy. On Monday morning, the man from the paper goods company just stared at me when I handed over the money for our napkin shipment.

  “You mean that’s it?”

  I shrugged. “What else is there?”

  “Plotnick usually screams and cries and calls me a criminal, and tries to get out of paying the tax. Then he counts all the napkins and pulls out the ones that are creased. I used to hate stopping here.”

  The meat man put it more succinctly. “I hope Plotnick never comes back.”

  The popularity of my Chocolate Memory dessert continued to grow, and I was now going through a dozen boxes of D-Lishus cake mix per day. My regulars ordered it all the time, and I was getting patrons from different parts of the city who had come in just to try my new dessert, the flavor everyone could remember but no one could identify. This inspired me to develop the Chocolate Memory à la mode, which meant the same old stuff with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. $2.95.

  As the week progressed, a peculiar phenomenon happened at the Olympiad. We continued to get our normal mealtime traffic. But a whole new crowd started to come from about six-thirty till closing, and all they wanted was dessert — more specifically, Chocolate Memory, plain and à la mode. They weren’t a neighborhood crowd, either. They were from all over, the trendy nightlifers, winding the evening down with coffee and dessert. They came from movies and plays, concerts and clubs, baseball games and discotheques, all converging on Pitt Street to eat my raw cake mix. Suddenly the buzz of conversation included such topics as foreign films, political theory, astrology, and funky fashion — all this in Plotnick’s restaurant with the salamis in the window.

  I was afraid my fellow tenants might object to the crowds and the noise and the late hours. But they seemed to enjoy the excitement, except for the Ugly Man, who hated everything. They were all Chocolate Memory fans anyway, and I did my best to keep their tables, speed them through lines, and give them quick service.

  On Friday and Saturday nights, I didn’t get to close until after one in the morning. When I finally managed to kick out the last jet-setting couple and sent them running off into the night musing, “What is that wonderful flavor they use?”, I grabbed the mile-long register tape and examined it. My estimate was that I pulled in twice as much money from coffee and dessert than from the three meals combined. I wasn’t running Plotnick’s business into the ground; I was launching it through the roof!

  My main problem was space. The deli could seat fifty-five, including seven stools at the counter, which my up-scale dessert crowd stayed away from. And while the people lined up outside were very good for my ego, they weren’t filling the cash register unless they were inside and eating. I needed to bump up my seating capacity. Plotnick had a bunch of old beaten-up tables and chairs stored in the basement and, one night, while Don was out with Jessica, Ferguson helped me haul them up.

  “Don’t worry about leaving space between them,” I advised. “If you can get through them turned sideways, it’s enough.” I looked around critically. “Better take those stools downstairs. That’ll make some room.”

  Ferguson stared at me. “Are you sure about this, Jason? What if Plotnick doesn’t like it?”

  I dismissed this. “All Plotnick cares about is money. The more tables, the more money.”

  Ferguson blinked, almost like a computer whose circuits were engaged. “In that case,” was his readout, “those booths have to go. They’re too bulky. You could get more than double the number of people in that space.”

  I laughed. “I’m not that crazy.” But from that moment on, the thought of the wasted space tormented me. I almost expected the booth people to order a little bit more, and to leave bigger tips, to compensate for taking up all that room so selfishly. I know it’s weird, but I really thought that.

  * * *

  Tuesday was my busiest night yet. It seemed that, no matter how many tables and chairs I crammed into the deli, the dessert-hungry evening crowd could fill them. I could no longer buy my cake mix from the supermarket. I had to set up a charge account with the D-Lishus Corporation. The stuff was arriving by the truckload.

  At around ten o’clock, with a full house and Plotnick pestering me on the phone, I had to drop everything to deal with Mr. Nevin, a weasel-like man who squeezed up to the counter and flashed me a badge that looked like it was at least from the FBI.

  “Nevin. Telephone company.”

  I was relieved. If he was the fire marshal, I had three times as many people in there as I was supposed to.

  His eyes narrowed. “Are you Mr. Plotnick?”

  “God forbid!” I blurted out. “My name is Cardone. I’m in charge here while Mr. Plotnick’s — away.”

  “We have a complaint against a line in this building — 555-9679.”

  I gulped. Joe’s number.

  “Apparently someone named Ron, or Don, has been harassing another of our customers, calling at all hours, and demanding to speak to a ‘Kiki.’ Now, we traced the calls, and contacted 555-9679 this afternoon. I spoke to a Mr. —” he consulted a notebook, “ — Rootbeer? He was not very cooperative.” His penetrating eyes raked my face, which must have been chalk-white. “I see this situation is familiar to you.”

  “Well,” I stammered, “I’m in charge of the restaurant. I don’t really have anything to do with the apartments.” So I live in one. So what? This could mean trouble for Don. Not to mention that my brother Joe wouldn’t be too happy to come home from Europe and find that his telephone had been confiscated.

  Mr. Nevin was no dummy. “We insist that this must stop, or we’ll have to take appropriate action. I’m sure you’ll know whom to speak to.”

  I mumbled, “I really don’t uh — have no idea — doesn’t ring a bell —”

  He gave me a look that not only said that he knew that I knew, but also that he was deeply disappointed in me for it. Then, thank God, he left.

  I practically threw the last few customers out the door in my anxiety to get upstairs.

  Ferguson, Don, and Jessica sat cross-legged in front of the television, playing Nintendo. Jessica’s careful bookkeeping system had broken down, and she had scheduled a date with both. An evening at home in my brother’s video playground was the compromise.

  As for Rootbeer, he had pawned the rock polisher and pushed about eight tons of shiny stones onto the discard pile in the corner. Now he was sprawled out in the midst of a giant deluxe chemistry set, turning clear liquids colored, and performing experiments from a little blue booklet.

  “Don,” I said, “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “What?” he said absently, manipulating the joystick. On the screen, two video adventurers were wandering through a labyrinth, vigorously decapitating goblins and demons with lightning swordplay.

  “I have to see you privately.” For his sake, I couldn’t very well talk about Kiki in front of Jessica.

  “In a minute.” His eyes never left the screen.

  “It’s important,” I insisted.

  “Give me a break! I’m finally going to beat Peachfuzz. I’m up three beheadings.”

  I grabbed him by the arm. “Come on!”

  Don threw down the joystick in disgust. “Now look what you made me do! I got stepped on by a dragon! Peachfuzz, this game doesn’t count!”

  I dragged him bodily into the bathroom, and Jessica took o
ver his place.

  Don was in a lousy mood. “How the heck did Peachfuzz get so good at video games?”

  “Because he’s been programming his own since he was three. Shut up and listen. We just got visited by an inspector from the phone company. You can’t call Kiki any more. The guy complained, they traced the calls, and we’re in big, big trouble!”

  Don put his hand to his mouth in horror. “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “I just called, while Jessica was in the bathroom! Maybe ten minutes ago! I told the guy if he didn’t let me talk to his daughter, I’d resort to desperate measures!”

  I gulped. “They wouldn’t know that I hadn’t warned you yet! It sounds like you’re threatening them!”

  Don looked anxious. “What can we do?”

  I racked my brain. “Maybe if you phone up right now and admit the whole thing —” My breath caught in my throat as I glanced out the window. Pitt Street was swarming with police cruisers. “Oh, my God!”

  Uniformed officers were piling out of five squad cars. We squinted at the streetlit scene. They were all holding rifles! I watched, transfixed, as the SWAT team surrounded the building.

  “Wow!” breathed Don. “Can you imagine what Plotnick would do if we told him there were rifles trained on his precious property?”

  I stared at him in horror and, seeing my face, it hit him, too. “You don’t think this has anything to do with —?”

  “The telephone company!” I shrieked.

  “But they don’t carry guns!” cried Don.

  I was hysterical. “They called the cops on us! We have to talk to them! We have to explain!” I began to work frantically to open the window. It was stuck.

  “Hey, guys,” called Rootbeer from the living room. “Come watch my experiment.”

  I heaved at the window with all my might. It wouldn’t budge. Desperately I hurled myself against the air conditioner in an attempt to push it out onto the fire escape.

  “Don! Help me!”

  The two of us put our backs to it, throwing ourselves painfully against the metal casing. I felt it give a little.

  “Last chance,” called Rootbeer. “It’s going to be amazing.”

  “Lie down!” yelled Don.

  “Lie down!? What are you — crazy?”

  “We can kick it out!”

  We got down on our backs, legs poised in the air, ready to pound the air conditioner with our feet.

  Tired of waiting for us, Rootbeer proceeded with his experiment. “Okay, here goes.”

  “Together!” I commanded. “One — two —!”

  “Oops,” came Rootbeer’s mildly annoyed voice.

  “ — three!”

  Boom! Rootbeer’s experiment blew up with a deafening roar just as Don and I brought our legs forward. We were so shocked by the explosion that our four feet jerked away from our bodies and dealt the air conditioner a tremendous wallop.

  It burst out of the window, skittered across the fire escape, and disappeared under the railing. A split second later, there was the sound of a ten thousand BTU cooling system smashing through the roof of a police cruiser.

  And then another sound — sharp — terrifying —

  Gunfire!

  TWELVE

  Yes, they shot up the building, and no, it wasn’t the telephone company.

  The Chief of Police himself came to explain it to us and to the rest of the tenants, except God’s Grandmother, who slept through the whole thing. It had all begun the last time a computer operator had attempted to take the Camaro off the stolen list. He hit the wrong button so, instead of deleting the entry, he bumped it up to Vehicles Connected With Dangerous Felons.

  “So it’s pretty straightforward,” the chief said cheerfully. “When our cruiser did a routine check of your license plate, he got a ‘Dangerous Felon’ flag. He called for backup. That’s standard procedure. And during routine deployment of personnel, there was an explosion, and one of our cars was taken out by an unidentified weapon.”

  “It was an air conditioner!” I wailed.

  “Our guys didn’t know that. They were going strictly by the book. Anyway, don’t worry, folks. It was our mistake, except for the air conditioner.”

  “We’re really sorry about that,” quavered Don. “It was an accident. We were just trying to get the window open so we could explain about the phone calls.”

  The chief grinned. “Oh, yeah, the phone calls. We don’t send the SWAT team to check out crank calls. The phone company uses the Air Force.” And he walked away, laughing.

  Ours was the only apartment that had sustained any damage. The police offered to set us up at a hotel, but since only our bathroom had been hit, we decided to stay put. Unbelievably, the air conditioner was still in great shape, but we didn’t have a window to put it in.

  Eventually the other tenants tired of the excitement and went back to bed. We followed them upstairs to find Rootbeer scrapping his chemistry set.

  “I’m disappointed,” was his only comment.

  Sleep would not come, so we lay awake, listening to the Phantom raving into the phone about the night’s events. Hearing about bombing the police with an air conditioner was even more ridiculous than actually doing it. If it hadn’t been us, I would have recommended that the perpetrators be locked in a rubber room.

  We went down again to watch the sun rise over the rubble. As the first rays glinted off the shards of broken glass that lay in front of 1 Pitt Street, we saw the full extent of the damage. Stray bullets had bitten pieces out of the ancient brick and shattered the brand-new show window of the deli.

  Don covered his eyes. “If my mom calls,” he moaned, “tell her she’s got the wrong number. There’s no way I could fake a good mood today.”

  * * *

  God’s Grandmother went out for her morning jog, but the nearsighted old lady still hadn’t noticed that anything was out of place at 1 Pitt Street. She just muttered something about poor streetcleaning as her sneakers crunched over the broken glass.

  I stood forlornly in the wreckage of my restaurant. With my meat fork, I absently pried a bullet out of the torpedo salami. It had once proudly hung in the show window, center of interest of the string of prepared meats.

  “They shot my salami,” I said to no one. The telephone rang, so I put down the carcass and went to answer it.

  “So, Mr. Cardone, how’s my restaurant?”

  “Kind of slow this morning,” I managed. A better answer would have been “What restaurant?” but how could I tell this poor, sick, old man that he’d been right all along? He was out of business.

  “Slow? How slow? Your gorilla friend is chasing away my customers?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Last night it was really hectic.” Understatement.

  “You’re a good boy, Mr. Cardone.”

  That hurt more than an insult. It was the first civil word he’d ever said to me, and the first time I hadn’t deserved it. I hung up feeling even lower than before.

  Don pulled by, turned, and parked the Camaro, carefully avoiding the broken glass. He got out carrying a large bag from a twenty-four-hour drugstore. “Soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and toilet paper,” he announced. “All the stuff they shot.”

  I could hear him perfectly. Only air separated the deli and the street. “I thought I told you to push that car over a cliff,” I said bitterly.

  Don shrugged. “I couldn’t find one high enough.” He and Ferguson were united for the first time all summer in the effort to cheer me up. I doubted that even the magic of Ferguson Peach, super-genius, could accomplish that.

  Don came over and put a hand on my shoulder. “Forget it,” he said comfortingly. “At least nobody got hurt. That’s pretty amazing.”

  “I guess,” I mumbled. “But we put the guy in the hospital, blew up his building, and now we have to walk out on him because there’s nothing else we can do.”

  “Sure there is,” said Don. “We can clean this up no sweat.”


  I looked at him in disgust. “There are times when being an optimist is just plain stupid. Look at this place! I wouldn’t even know where to start!”

  Rootbeer entered, carefully opening and closing the door even though there was no glass in it. “Coffee,” he ordered, as though this were an ordinary morning, and flopped down in our regular booth. Weakened by the wildly ricocheting bullets, the frame collapsed under his weight, and Rootbeer disappeared below seat level, his huge legs jackknifing into the air.

  “Well,” he sighed, “no sense keeping these around.” He got up and, with one grunt, wrenched the entire line of booths from their moorings, and heaved the whole mess — twelve benches and six tables — out the gaping window and onto the sidewalk.

  I stared. There! It was that easy! Where the booths had been lay bare floor, nice and clean. All it took was a little brute strength. I looked at Rootbeer and almost smiled. A lot of brute strength.

  Just then the Peach’s voice came from inside Plotnick’s apartment behind the deli. “Hey, guys, you’d better come in here.”

  I couldn’t stand the suspense. “Just break it to me. Will his insurance cover it?”

  “You have to see it to believe it!”

  Don and I joined Ferguson in Plotnick’s living room. The Peach was standing by a two-drawer filing cabinet that stood amidst the overstuffed Victorian furniture. The grin on his face was pure unholy delight. He showed us a file folder three inches thick. On the top was scrawled Insurance.

  “He’s covered?” I barely whispered.

  Ferguson laughed. “Enough to rebuild ten delis. What do you want to bet he makes a profit?”

  That was it for me. The smile hit, my first since Mr. Nevin from the phone company had walked up to me twelve hours, or a hundred and fifty thousand years, ago.

  * * *

  Ferguson and Don both took the day off work and, with Rootbeer’s help, we completely emptied the deli. The sooner we got the work done, the less chance there was of word getting back to Plotnick that he’d had a disaster. There had been nothing in the papers, and the police were hoping to keep it that way. The whole business didn’t reflect very well on them.