Killers

KILLERS

(an urban tough guy novel)

by

Lynn Hoffman

Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Published on Smashwords by:

Lynn Hoffmann

1601 S. 11th St.

Philadelphia, PA 19148

drfood55@gmail.com

Killers

Copyright 2011 by Lynn Hoffman

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

•

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Saturday

Sunday

•

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

•

Monday

Thursday

* * * * *

Listen, kids. I'm sorry about the news we got today. Sorry that you had to hear it, sorry that there’s so little time left for us now. On the way home from the doctor’s, I was thinking about my father and how, after he died I found some things of his that made me realize that in a way, I hardly knew him-there was a whole part of his life that never leaked out. It made me sad, those last revelations, like there was an extra death in there that took me by surprise.

So here’s something for you to know about me. It’s a little story about something that happened just before your mom and I got together. I wrote it out so you could read it a day at a time. I don’t think you’ll be shocked-I hope we raised you shock-proof-but it might explain some things. I love you, Dad.

* * * * *

Tuesday

I remember exactly when I decided to kill Jim Pifkie. It was just before noon on a Tuesday morning after a long Columbus Day weekend. I celebrated Columbus with three days of drinking , weaving and cursing and pissing on my shoes. By Tuesday I was way past drunk and well into poisoned; if Congress had made Columbus Day into Columbus Week, I would have been a dead man.

On the Friday before the festivities, I turned in two restaurant reviews ahead of deadline. I wrote the forward for somebody else’s book of recipes, sent out some queries about a winery in Graz, Austria and edited this week’s tasting notes. Then I put my work away and started drinking: whole cedary, scratchy, dirty bottles of dark red wine. By Sunday I was sure I was dying. Someplace in the sour-smelling little vestibule in front of drinking-yourself-to-death, I saw my mother’s face, pinched and staring. The face didn’t look at me or move its lips, but I heard her voice saying You’re not the one who should die. Then I heard my own voice saying the name of the one who should.

Deciding to kill Pifkie was the best thing I did all day. Oh sure, it was the same day I screamed obscenities at my oldest living relative and threw a wine bottle at a male prostitute. And I almost bit a fat lady on the saggy flesh at the back of her neck. Drooled all over her in fact. Good stuff, highlights film stuff. But none of it was half as satisfying as deciding that I was going to kill Jim Pifkie.

•

When I was a kid, Columbus Day was special. My father-Solomone Cardoso, Sol- arrived in this country one Columbus Day in the early 1950’s. My mother-a sweet Catholic girl who converted to Judaism to marry him- let him name me Emanuel. My dad never said he ‘immigrated’, he always said he ‘discovered America’. In our family, Thanksgiving was the Dry Bird Festival and Christmas was just a day off, but Columbus Day was our Easter, our day of Resurrection.

We always had a big family party and after dinner, my father would dance. When he danced, his face danced with him. The dances felt like little stories and you could feel the narrations in the vibrations of his feet, imagine the characters at whom he was smiling and frowning and clicking his tongue. His eyes fluttered and his lips took a hundred different poses below the wide ledge of his moustache. I was five years old when I began to memorize his little smiles and smirks and pouts and purses. He swirled and dipped and his eyebrows could make a wave of their own, like a string of corks on the ocean. He would stamp his foot just softly enough not to upset the phonograph needle or the neighbors. His jaw would go down and out, lip-smacking the air to fill in the sound his heel barely made as he brushed it along the wooden floor.

I was a few years older when I discovered the rest, learned that the stories were about confiscations and late-night escapes and heroes and sick goodbyes and death. But those were just details. Everything that mattered was there in his dancing, all the feelings and all the ghosts.

Sometimes he would jig a handkerchief at my red-haired, freckly mother and she would take the bait, pinching her end of the cloth and following him around the room. Her movements were as compact as his were expansive; her hand just outboard of her hip, fingers splayed out suggestively, elbow thrown back. Her dancing was economically lewd, frugal, not stingy. It gave the scratchy middle eastern music everything it deserved. When he danced with her, his story changed. In this chapter, he was playful, then macho, then silly then desperately wanting. Sometimes at the end of a dance, he would tremble and when I was little, I thought it meant he was cold.

My mother moved as if she were a seed blown on the wind. Her dance seemed to cost her no effort but that of willing it. My father perspired when he danced. It should have been grotesque and it was beautiful. To this day, I am not especially moved by the people they call charismatic - I was raised by a man who could dance in tongues.

•

Years later, when I was an all grown up small-time restaurant reviewer and often too busy to make it home for Columbus Day, my father retired and invested the savings of twenty-nine years in real estate. The deal he bought into turned out to be a scam and within a month of investing, the company disappeared along with their money. Fifty-three days after he realized he had made them both poor, my father sat down next to a running automobile in a closed garage and killed himself in a sure-fire, mess-proof, easy-as-possible-on-the-survivors way. . My mother died in her sister’s house three months later, propped up on pillows and staring at a spot on the wall.

The man who swindled him was named Jim Pifkie. We used to work for the same weekly city paper.He is now a big shot syndicated financial columnist and I still write the restaurant column for the weekly.

I introduced him to my parents.

Now my mom and dad are both dead, Jim Pifkie is still alive and so am I. Every Columbus Day weekend, I have a vision whenever I close my eyes or go from a light place to a dark one. I see my father dancing. He loops and leaps and stamps and clicks. His circling arms gather in the wind and throw out showers of gold. And as he dances, his face, a surprised and thoroughly dead olive blue frozen mask, jerks along after his body like a balloon on a string. (Did I mention that I introduced them to the man who, with perfect precision and infallible insulation from prosecution, took all their money? Yeah, I did.)

I have the vision at other times too; usually at seasons and celebrations when everybody else is at least pretending to be happy. The last time was after a beach party. I spent three hours talking and listening with a woman who made me laugh. I promised to call her, left the party swollen with expectation. Or maybe just swollen. The vision came that night just after my eyes closed, my father’s cyanotic face surprised and hurt.

Sometimes I leave all the lights on and try to drink enough red wine to slip around it. Can you drink away a vision of a headless dead Dad? I don't know, but the score so far is a lot to nothing in favor of: you can't.

•

The fat lady was standing facing the street at the bus stop leaning backwards into the Daily News honor box. She looked sad in that same hopeful way Miss America contestants look happy; like she wanted you to notice it, like she expected an award for it. She was fifty or so and slumped inside an orange tweed coat that slumped from her shoulders and a few inches of bread dough skin showing above her collar. Leaning into the box, she flowed around it like an oily vine taking over a small tree.

You could almost see the tape inside her head fully rewound and ready. If anybody had been dumbfuck enough to press the right button, she would have played back all the things that went wrong with her two-inch universe. She was the only creature in sight who had a shot at being more pathetic than I was. You would have thought I’d be empathetic with the pathetic, but things being what they were, I was fresh out of ‘path.

Excuse me, could you move over for a second so I can get a paper?

She didn’t exactly look at me, she just flicked sad white eyes my way, swayed a little and went back to looking half at the street and half up to heaven. Deaf maybe. I sidestepped so I was facing her, raised my voice and exaggerated my lip motions.

Pardon me, ma’am, could you let me get in there a second?

I was here first.

I couldn’t argue with that. She still hadn’t moved and I was much too hung over to wait for her bus to come and carry her away. I thought about slipping my hand between her and the coin slot and wriggling the money in and then jerking the door open, but that seemed almost intimate. The thought nauseated me so I thought that maybe I could make it worse. I decided to bite one of her neck folds just to see if she would scream. I wasn't looking for little yips or low mournful Motheragods. I wanted to hear something from down in the stale locker room of her bowels, something that sounded like life. I wanted to be an actual, bite-the-fat-lady-and-call-a-sports-radio-talk-show-to-tell-about-it kind of guy

I counted her breaths; one, two and reached my jaws toward her left shoulder and smacked my lips. Her skin had a powdery look and a greasy cheap cooking oil bouquet. It was like sniffing a damp memo pad. The smell of her reminded me for a second of Three Feathers Blended whiskey and camphor. I clamped down on the gag reflex, I was going in. I moved closer, aiming my teeth for a spot on the open plains in between two of the deepest craters. An astronaut. The smell of her cheesy grey flesh reminded me of shredded provolone, the good, two-year old kind.

She didn't notice me, or at least she didn't move. I flipped out of my trance for a minute and saw myself standing at Broad and Lombard about to take this stale smelling corpse of a woman between my teeth. Then a little drop of saliva popped out of my mouth and landed, trailing a stream behind it, right on her neck. For a second we were connected by a silver thread of drool.

People were staring. I got scared and sick and spit out on to the sidewalk. The fat lady made a bleeting sound like a sheep in a petting zoo

She didn't say anything and her eyes didn't seem to focus. She may have never even noticed me. I heard a man's bass voice say Hey, you, what the hell do you think you're doing? A greasy ski-slope feeling climbed up to the inside of my lips and I wanted to puke down its side but the tank was on empty. I knew I needed help. The fat lady folded her purse into her chest and started to turn toward me. I ran and for a few steps, someone may have followed.

I would have hated myself if there had been any self left to hate. The closest thing I had to a feeling was something like embarrassment. Back at the apartment I started rummaging for help.

There was a bottle of '82 Mouton Rothschild in the wine room.I'd been saving it for a time like this. My tasting notes on the blue index card said malodorous and vulgar with dominant flavors of mushrooms and rotten cherries. I passed it by—too much saving grace. In the freezer I found four giant gel caps. They were repackaged downers I got from a committed, earth-oriented recycler.

One, she told me is too many.

I took two. The sick feeling went away and a wave of weakness passed over me like polluted Jersey surf. It wasn't death, but it wasn't bad, and in that instant I knew what was wrong with my life.

I was, indeed, killing the wrong guy.

The boxy red numbers on the espresso machine's clock insisted it was 11:22 AM. I knew what had to happen. I had to sober up, drink some orange juice, take a shower, call my shrink and then figure out exactly how I was going to kill Jim Pifkie.

•

To get to the Free People's Mental Health Clinic in West Philadelphia you have to turn down the alley next to Caccione's Pizza. My revelation was just abouth one hour old and I wanted to share it with Salvatore.

Dr. Salvatore Mastrolino is about six-foot four or five with long black curls hanging over his shoulders. He was a South Philadelphia High School fist-fighting tough guy—Sally Knuckles to his friends— who woke up one morning and found himself smart. One day he was a wise guy and the next day he was just wise.

He went down south and got his doctors in counseling from the University of Big Dumb Rednecks in Apaskagogee where he developed a taste for country music and tried to stay out of fights. He hung out with musicians and volunteered at a drug clinic. He mostly counseled guys who were having problems in their relationships with their hunting dogs or their sisters.

Sal came back to Philadelphia a changed man. He had a love for the pedal steel guitar and a new insight about his sister Donna. He also came back with a distaste for violence and a warm feeling for the occasional skin pop of heroin.

Going to see Sal at the clinic was a mixed blessing. On one hand there was the smell of diapers, cloves and saffron in the waiting room. On the other hand there was the background music-Sal’s personal collection of country songs about going or being crazy.

But the music was speckled with static just then and I mostly noticed the stink of the waiting room, a Vietnamese movie poster, a few back issues of Black Thang magazine, and me. Almost forty years old and waiting for my shrink at two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon with the rubbery smell of fat lady lingering on the lips of my imagination.

At least they had a Daily News in the waiting room. I turned to the food-review section to see what my competition was doing. I read my way past The Two Minute Gourmet and was right in the middle of Hot Dog Hot Line by the time someone said Mr. Cardoso, Dr. Mastrolino will see you now. As soon as I walked in Sal's office, I told him about my Columbus Weekend.

Ya know Sal, it's a stupid holiday for a Spanish Jew anyway, I mean it smells of death and escape and the riches of the Indies and it's named for some deluded gentile who got it all wrong but ended up all right. My Irish relatives don't celebrate Potato Famine Day. Sal Mastrolino was unmoved. I could tell because he wasn't moving. He was staring at something on the floor on the other side of his desk. I needed to hook him, to get him involved in this session. I thought about a riff on whose idea was it to move Columbus Day to a Monday and turn it into a Weekend anyway? but it seemed too much like amateur night at the comedy club and not enough like a soul desperate for help.

So I told him my other big secret. I hate my job. No, I don’t hate it, I‘m just not impressed by it anymore. It seems so fuckin’ trivial. He barely moved. I wanna be a contender.

So, contend.

Sometimes I wish Sal would act more like a therapist, you know, get involved, seem to care, stuff like that.

Then I told him the story about the fat lady at the bus stop; it’s a therapist-trapping tale if ever there was one. Sal listened a while, right through to the drool. Then he asked me a question:

Are you an only child.?

He always asks me that. For a second I thought about telling him that I'd discovered that I really had a half sister; my father's illegitimate daughter that he created with a Philadelphia woman named Mastrolino, but something held me back.

Sal's sense of humor was erratic. At high tide it tumbled everything on the beach in laughter, it picked out the ridiculous needle in the mundane haystack. At low tide it left this slightly tilted shore covered with Angry Irritable Bastard shells. Maybe that's why I loved him, but it was certainly why I distrusted his nonviolence act. Anyway, whatever the state of the tide, Sal's size was a constant and it was a constant Extra Large. I decided to pass on his straight line and for the nineteenth time, I reminded him that I was an only child and that scientists had discovered that too much time listening to Loretta Lynn can make you as stupid as dryer lint.

Then I told him about the orange juice and the wine and my crystal bright vision of killing Jim Pifkie. I reminded him that my lust had dried up in the last year or so and my sense of humor might be the next thing to go. I was a man in decline.

The problem, Manny he said isn't with killing Pifkie.....the problem is that all this is so....you know....unfocused. I mean what does biting a harmless old woman have to do with a mealy-mouthed, pious, altar boy columnist? What the hell's the connection here? You haven’t been with a woman in a long time, you haven’t smelled a woman’s pefume on the pillow next to you or slid your hands along a woman’s naked legs or felt her breast brushing up against you in the hot tub at my condo or…..oh, where was I? Yeah, it’s been a long time since you dipped danny in the dungeon and your only idea is to bite a woman on the neck? It don’t make sense, boy-o.

He had a point.

•

I just walked in the door when