A Firing Offense

  I watched a yacht leave the marina while I killed my second round. I settled up and walked back out, up the street and to my car. Heading northwest, I stopped at a liquor store and bought a sixpack and a pint of Old Crow.

  Before my next stop I slammed two cans of beer and had a fierce pull off the bottle. I wasn’t really sure where I was going, but it didn’t much matter. I knew at that point that I was spiraling down into a black binge.

  I parked in front of May’s, a glorified pizza parlor on Wisconsin between Georgetown and Tenley Circle. To the left of the dining room was a bar run by a fat Greek named Steve Maroulis. Maroulis also made book from behind the bar.

  “Ella, Niko!” he shouted when I walked in.

  “Steve,” I said, and took a stool at the bar next to a red-faced geezer in an Orioles hat.

  “What’ll it be?” Maroulis asked cheerfully, with a smile on his melonlike face.

  “A Bud and a shot.”

  “You still drinkin’ Grand-Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  He put both in front of me and I drained the shot glass. I lit a smoke and put the matches on top of the pack, then slid them neatly next to my bottle of beer. All settled in.

  “Sorry to hear about Big Nick,” Maroulis said.

  “He had a life.”

  “Tough sonofabitches, those old Greeks.”

  “That they were.”

  “Not like us.”

  “No,” I said. “Not like us.”

  I drank my beer and watched a soap opera on the bar television. A pretty-boy actor was doing his impersonation of a man, while the young actress opposite him was trying to convince the audience that she could love a guy who wore eye makeup.

  I ordered another round and finished watching the show. When the next one came on, the same garbage with different theme music, I asked Maroulis to switch the channel.

  “Anything,” I said. “Christ, even The Love Boat would be better than this shit. How about a movie?” I was looking at the stacks of tapes Maroulis had lined up next to the VCR.

  “No movies!” the geezer next to me declared, and pounded his fist on the bar to make his point. “Haven’t seen a movie since Ben Hur. Don’t plan to either. They’re all shit.”

  “All right, old-timer,” I said. “No movies.”

  And, I might have added, “Welcome to the ’90s.” I thought of T. J. Lazarus, another senior who claimed he hadn’t seen a movie in years. But there had been a brand-new television and VCR in his house. Probably one of the gifts from Kim that he had mentioned. I thought of Kim’s state-of-the-art equipment in her barren apartment. But from the looks of her collection, she hadn’t purchased a record since Don Kirshner’s heyday. And I thought of Pence, with his unconnected recorder, a pathetic reminder of the gift from his missing grandson. Gifts.

  The geezer next to me was still talking. I don’t know if he was talking to me. I smoked another cigarette and moved the ashes around in the ashtray with the lit end. In my other hand I held the empty shot glass and made circles with it on the bar. I finished my beer.

  “Steve,” I said, calling him over. “You still got that phone in the office upstairs?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to use it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He handed me an unsolicited beer as I stepped away from the bar. I put the Camels in my breast pocket and passed the kitchen, tripping once as I went up a narrow staircase. I found the small office and had a seat at a government-issue desk that faced a dirty window overlooking the alley. The phone directory was under the desk.

  I looked up the number for the local authorized Kotekna service center and dialed it. After two rings a friendly voice picked up.

  “Service,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’ve got a problem with my VCR.”

  “Is it in warranty, sir?”

  “Yes, but it’s been serviced twice already. I’m not interested in having another serviceman look at it. What I need from you, is there some sort of eight-hundred number, a customer service line or anything like that?”

  “Hold on,” he said, a little less friendly. He got back on the line and gave me the number. I thanked him, hung up, and dialed the number he had given me. A recorded voice instructed me to wait for the next available operator. Before the message ended a live voice broke in on the line.

  “Kotekna Video. Customer service.”

  “Customer service?” I said lamely. “I’m sorry. I’m a retailer, not a customer. I was trying to get the sales manager for the mid-Atlantic region. What’s his name again?”

  “Bruce Baum,” she said.

  “Yes, of course. Could you connect me please?” There was a click, then a couple of rings.

  “Mr. Baum’s office,” a sweet voice said.

  “This is Gary Fisher,” I said, “with Nutty Nathan’s in Washington. Can I speak to Bruce, please?”

  “Let me see if he’s in. Hold, please.” A click, more waiting, then, “I’ll connect you.”

  “Bruce Baum,” a smooth voice said.

  “Bruce,” I said, “Gary Fisher, the merch manager with Nutty Nathan’s.”

  “Gary,” he said with false warmth. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m really calling for some advice on one of your products.”

  “Go ahead, Gary.”

  “My company purchased a hundred sticks from your people at the CES show in Vegas, a closeout I think.”

  “That’s right. The KV100, wasn’t it? Your GM, Jerry Rosen, cut the deal himself.”

  “Yes. Anyway, to be honest with you, I’m having some trouble moving them. I don’t know if it’s a problem with price point, or if I’m not promoting them correctly, or what?” I heard the slur of my words and let him talk.

  “Well,” he said, “I hope you’re not trying to make the full mark on them. After all, even considering they were defects, I practically gave them away.”

  “Defects?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then,” he said with a chuckle, “there’s your problem right there. Miscommunication in your office. I had this load of KV100’s with defective boards. Jerry Rosen came out to the show and decided to take them off my hands for practically nothing. He said he was going to have your service department order the new parts, fix the units themselves, then blow them out at a strong retail to make an impression in your market. He probably hasn’t gotten the parts yet. That’s why they’re still sitting in your barn.”

  “The units are shells right now, is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thanks, Bruce.”

  “Thank you. Let me know how you do with them. We’ve been trying to get our foot in your door for years. Frankly, I cut this deal with Rosen as an entrée.”

  “I’ll let you know, Bruce. Thanks again.” I hung up.

  I put fire to a Camel and leaned back in my chair. A bird flew onto the window ledge, saw me, and flew off. I exhaled a line of smoke and watched it shatter as it hit the glass. I heard cynical laughter and realized it was mine.

  There was one more call to make, a detail done so that I could put it all away and return to my cleansing binge. I got South Carolina information on the line.

  I contacted the personnel director for Ned’s World. I identified myself as a the personnel manager of a large retail chain in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. After a couple of questions my suspicions were confirmed.

  Then I was downstairs and spilling money on the bar. Steve Maroulis yelled something to my back as I walked out. The temperature had dropped and the sun was buried in a thick cover of clouds. Still, the light burned my eyes. I put on shades and got behind the wheel of my car.

  I cut down Thirty-Eighth to Nebraska, across Connecticut and right on Military to Missouri, then left on Georgia. I pulled over and parked across the street from the Good Times Lunch.

  Kim shot me a look when I walked in. Some heads turne
d in the gray-haired group seated near the upright fan and the malt liquor poster featuring Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. I sat on the stool nearest the front door. Kim walked over with a pad in his hand.

  “No food today, Kim. Just give me a can of beer.”

  He brought one, set it down, and walked away. I drank half of it in one swallow and lit a cigarette. The fan blew my smoke in the direction of the front door. I killed my beer and shouted for Kim to bring me another.

  I dozed off or blacked out for a minute or so. When I opened my eyes, Kim was setting a fresh beer in front of me. I popped the top and drank deeply. Some of the beer ran down my chin.

  “Last one,” Kim said.

  “Sure, Kim.”

  “Go home, Nick.” There was something approaching sadness on his face.

  I left the remainder of the beer and a pile of ones on the counter. I stumbled out and stepped off the curb. A group of kids yelled something from a car that nearly grazed me. The kid riding shotgun flipped me off.

  My Dodge came to life. I swung a “U” on Georgia and headed back downtown. I undid the top of the pint with one hand and took a burning slug. I cracked another beer and wedged it between my thighs.

  The car next to me honked and someone yelled. I turned the radio louder. I passed what was once a movie theater and was now a Peoples Drug Store. My thoughts moved back twenty years.

  I AM TEN YEARS old in this summer of 1968. I’m on the bus, the J-2, on my daily trip down Georgia Avenue to F Street, where I’ll transfer to another bus that will take me crosstown to papou’s carryout. I bag lunches there behind the counter.

  The D.C. Transit bus, with its turquoise vinyl seats and orange striping, is not air-conditioned. The ones they commission to this part of town never are. By ten in the morning, when I ride, the bus already reeks with the sweat of working Washington.

  This summer things feel different. Georgia Avenue is not the worst of spots, but the fires of April have lapped at this street. Every week I notice more businesses have closed. There seems to be a tension on the bus between blacks and whites, though I’m not afraid. Something is happening and I’m there to see it. Women wear large, plastic florescent earrings that read, “Black Is Beautiful” over the silhouettes of Afro’ed couples. Lawyers have long hair and wear wide, flowery ties. The ultrasquare DJ, Fred Fiske on 1260 AM, is playing the Youngblood’s “Get Together” in heavy rotation.

  I read the changing marquees of the neighborhood movie theaters that line Georgia Avenue: Eleanor Parker and Michael Sarrazin in Eye of the Cat; George Peppard and Orson Welles in House of Cards; Alex Cord in Harold Robbins’ Stiletto. Downtown, at the Trans-Lux, The Great Bank Robbery, with Clint Walker and Kim Novak, has just opened.

  At three in the afternoon, after the lunch rush is over at papou’s store, a man drops a stack of Daily News on top of the cigarette machine. I take one to a booth and read the reviews of the films whose titles I have seen splashed across the marquees earlier in the day.

  I look behind the counter at my grandfather. He is slicing a tomato that he holds in his hand. The juice of the tomato stains the yellowish apron he wears around his ample middle. There is a Band-Aid on his thumb from his accident on the meat slicer earlier in the day. He sees the tabloid open in front of me and knows my daily ritual.

  “Anything good today at the movies, Niko?” he shouts across the store.

  “Nothing much, Papou.”

  “Okay, boy,” he says, and continues to slice the tomato. There is a smile on his wide, pink face.

  I THREW MY HEAD back and killed another beer. More horns sounded. I pulled back within the lines of my lane and turned left on Florida Avenue, heading east.

  I ran the red at North Capitol and bore left onto Lincoln Road. I passed houses with rotting back porches, alleys littered with garbage, and packs of young men grouped like predators on street corners.

  Then I was veering left, passing under the black, arched iron gate of the Glenwood Cemetery. I pulled the top on another beer and stayed to the right, driving slowly around long curves and lazy inclines, by rows of headstones and monuments crammed together, their symmetry broken only by the occasional dogwood or pine.

  As the names on the headstones changed from Protestant to ethnic, I slowed down. When I reached a section that only contained the graves of Greeks, I stopped the car.

  I remained seated and drank my last beer. When I finished it, I crushed the can, tossed it into the backseat, and slipped the pint bottle inside my jacket. I got out of the car and staggered onto the grass.

  Spartan immigrants had chosen to lie here. They were buried on a long hill overlooking the road and a junior-high playground. A few of the headstones mentioned their native villages and the year in which they came to America.

  I recognized many of the family names. Some had been friends with, or had known my grandfather: Kerasiotas, Kalavratinos, Stathopoulos, Psarakis. On the headstone of a guy named Vlatos, the inscription read, “I Wish I Was in Vegas.”

  I had a seat under an oak tree across from my grandfather’s headstone. I reached into my jacket and pulled out the pint, tilted it back to my mouth, and watched bubbles rise to its upturned base. I swallowed, toasted my grandfather with the bottle, and replaced the cap.

  Though it was probably very cool, I felt comfortable. I listened to the faint laughter and yells of the boys playing ball on the playground at the foot of the hill. The wind blew small yellow leaves around my feet. And I stared at the headstone that bore my name: Nicholas J. Stefanos.

  I stayed in that position for the remainder of the afternoon. I was unable to focus my thoughts on any one thing; all of my emotions seemed to flow through me at once. In the end there were only a few pathetic certainties: I was thirty years old, unemployed, and sitting dead drunk in a graveyard, an empty pint of rotgut bourbon in my hand.

  Sometime after the skies had darkened and the sounds of the playground had died away, a man in a caretaker’s uniform walked towards me. He kicked the soles of my shoes lightly. The name stitched across his chest, on a white patch, was Raymond.

  “You better get on up,” he said. “They’ll be lockin’ the gates, and just before that the police cruise through.”

  “Thanks,” I said, using his arm to help me up.

  “You all right, man?”

  “Yeah, Raymond. Thanks a million.”

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE ride home, except that there was shouting and more hornblowing. There was also a nasty bit of business at the National Shrine, where I attracted a small crowd when I pulled over to vomit.

  I woke up early the next morning, halfway on my bed and fully clothed. There was some puke splashed across my denim shirt, and a dried clump of it on my chin.

  I had a cold shower. After that, I put on side two of the Replacements’ Tim, the most violently melodic rock and roll I owned. I cleared the room and forced myself to jump rope.

  By the time Bob Stinson’s blistering guitar solo kicked in, on “Little Mascara,” my eyes were closed and I was working the rope, my body soaked with sweat and alcohol.

  I took another shower, as hot as I could stand it, and shaved. I cooked breakfast, made a pot of coffee, and finished them both. I put on clean clothes and ran fresh water into the cat’s dish.

  Then I climbed into my Dodge and pointed it in the direction of James Pence.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE BUZZER UNLOCKED the glass doors automatically. I stepped into the building, past the security guard and the woman at the switchboard, and into the elevator. I rode it to the tenth floor and walked the narrow carpeted hallway to Pence’s apartment. The door was open as I arrived.

  The final drag of Pence’s cigarette burned between his fingers. The familiar smell of Old Spice and whiskey drifted towards me.

  “You look like hell,” he said.

  “May I come in?”

  “Certainly.” He stepped aside as I passed.

  I walked into the living room, hearing his padded footstep
s behind me. I turned to look at him. The grief of the last weeks had taken years from him, years he didn’t have.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “No coffee. Why don’t you just get me a screwdriver. A Phillips head, can you do that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I own one.”

  “Then do it.”

  I heard him rummage through a drawer in the kitchen. I picked up the VCR from the lower shelf of the television stand and moved it over to the dining room table. It felt very light.

  Pence brought me the screwdriver. I took it and worked on the back of the recorder. He lit another cigarette and sat watching me from the end of the table. His face was reddening from embarrassment, but there was also a look on him something like relief.

  When the screws were off, I lifted the back panel and put it aside. I reached in and felt around, then looked it over with a perfunctory glance. I sat back in my chair and stared at Pence. He looked away.

  “It’s empty,” I said. “But you knew that.”

  “Yes.” He looked at his lap boyishly and blew some smoke at his knees.

  I walked over to the window and raised the blinds. Then I cranked open the casement window and breathed cool air.

  “Is my grandson alive?” Pence said in a small voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know, Mr. Stefanos?”

  I turned and looked at him angrily. “I know now what you’ve suspected for weeks. The people I used to work for are involved in some sort of drug trafficking. They’re moving the drugs through the warehouse in these VCRs. I think that Jimmy stole one and brought it home. Do we agree so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “When he got it home and saw it was dead, he opened up the back and found its contents. He was never fired from Nathan’s, he just never went back. But he knew they’d figure out eventually who took the VCR. So he got scared and left town with the drugs and a couple of friends he made along the way. You figured all this out and came to me for help. Then you put the VCR out where I could see it, knowing I’d notice it, right?”