CHAPTER 12
The chauffeur picks us up, and he’s driving a black Mercedes, brand new, looks like it’s never been driven before. He opens the door for me, and I thank him, and she thanks him and calls him by his name. James. Thanks, James. James is a tall black man, who looks like he’s about fifty, but still healthy.
“Do you know where we’re going?” She leans over the driver’s seat.
“If the message I got was from you, then yes.”
“Remember, don’t mention it to anyone. If you do, I’ll have to find a new chauffeur.” She laughs and grabs his ear.
“Oh, God, please. Don’t make me drive any other rich white people around.” He says, and we both laugh at him.
“James, how long have you been driving for Ashley’s family?”
“I’d say, thirty years or so. When I turned twenty, her father came to me and asked me to do it. So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years.”
“How do you like it?”
“The hours are good. The pay is good. The clientele is sometimes…obnoxious. But other than that, it’s an easy job.”
“James is basically a member of the family.”
“That’s true. If I ever get invited to one of your family reunions, it’s going to be weird being the only black man there.”
“You’ll fit right in.” She pats him on the shoulder.
We drive for what feels like two hours, until Ashley says she’s hungry.
“Where do you want to eat?”
“Where’s close?”
“I’m not sure. I think there’s a place off of this exit. If you’re that hungry.”
“I’m fucking starving.” She rolls around in her seat.
“Don’t make me wash your mouth out with soap, young lady.”
“Excuse me. I’m fucking starving, my good sir.”
“Keep on.”
We pull up to this diner that looks like shit from the outside, and I’m hoping that Ashley’s not hungry enough to eat here. But she gets out the second he parks, and James kind of turns around and looks at me and rolls his eyes.
“Never get between a woman and her stomach. Best words of advice I can give you.”
“I’ll take that in mind.”
“You guys have fun. I’m going to wait here in the car.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Nah. I already ate before I came to pick you up. Had myself a sub with every possible meat you can imagine stuffed on it.”
I get out and Ashley’s waiting for me at the hood. She looks antsy, jumping around the way she is. It’s that hunger I guess. Never get between a woman and her stomach. The place looks like shit though. There are only a couple of cars parked around. It looks like it’s on the corner of depressing and suicidal. The paint is peeling off the side, and the windows all look like they’ve been broken, or replaced. The moment we walk in though, it’s like a completely different view. Everything inside is sparkling, new, and it looks like a four star restaurant trapped inside of a broken down house.
“Welcome, welcome!” A fat red headed man appears from behind the counter, and walks up to us. He’s wearing a red tuxedo-like outfit, and his face is red, but he seems nice.
“How many of you will be dining with us tonight?”
“Two.” Ashley says, holding her fingers up.
“Two is excellent. May I ask, are you two dating?” He says, grabbing the menus out beside the host stand.
“Yes, in fact we are.”
“Even better. Nothing cheers my heart more than to see a young couple eat under my roof. Please, follow me.” He walks us back to the middle of the restaurant, and everything looks like it was just put in five minutes before we came. What looks like mahogany wood used for the booths, and red leather used for the seating.
“If you don’t mind me asking, why does the outside of this place look like shit and the inside look so new?” I say, as he sits us down and hands out the menus.
“I’ll tell you, I got the place dirt cheap. They were basically paying me to take it. So, when I say yes, I think, why not fix the place up a bit? Start from the inside and work my way out. Next week, a company is coming and they’re going to redo everything on the exterior. Then it will be beautiful both inside and out.”
“Why was it so cheap?”
“Ah, a magician never reveals his secret. Your waitress will be with you momentarily, as you can see, she is a bit preoccupied with another table. But I hope you two enjoy your meals!”
The waitress has three other tables in the restaurant, and she looks very young. Maybe twenty five, twenty seven. Redhead, real cute. But then I look at Ashley, and I stop thinking about the waitress.
“Jesus, the menu looks great, doesn’t it?” Ashley says, staring at the menu.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just surprised at this place. You’d think more people would be here. On a Friday night that is.” I look down at the menu and close my eyes and point, and it lands on a filet mignon, so I move my finger up, and it lands on some sort of seafood platter.
“Hello there. My name is Patricia, and I’ll be your waitress tonight. We have a couple of specials if you’re interested to hear them. I’ll tell you, the duck is amazing. I’ve eaten it twice already, and I just started working here last week.”
“I have a question, actually.” I say, signaling her to lean in, so I can whisper it.
“Yes, sir?”
“How did the owner get this place so cheap? I mean, it’s in a good location. He said they basically gave it to him.” She looks over her shoulder, to make sure the owner isn’t there.
“He wouldn’t tell me either. Said it was a secret. So I went around asking people what they had heard, and apparently, there was a big thing that happened here maybe about a year ago.”
“What type of big thing?”
“Well, apparently, this was the scene of a crime.”
“You mean like a robbery?” Ashley says.
“No, much worse than that. I hate to tell the story because it terrifies me every time I tell it. From what I heard, one of the customers had killed everyone in the restaurant and taken their money. At first, I thought it was just an exaggeration. I mean, how can one person kill that many people? But the way he did it was sick, he went to the front of the restaurant, shot the host, the manager, and a couple of the waitresses, went in the back, shot the cooks and the dish washer, then came out to the dining area and told everyone to give him their money or he’d shoot them. Thing is, everyone gave him their money, but he shot them anyway .Then he turned around and shot the girl he brought with him to help, saying she was worthless. He got away, but a boy and his mother were underneath one of the booths. When they heard the shooting, the mother grabbed everything off of the table and hid it under the seat, and they stuck up against the wall, and the shooter never saw them. He killed twenty people. They closed down the place, and they were going to knock it down until the bank said they wanted to profit off of it.
It’s sick. Makes me disgusted, thinking that someone could do something like that. Not even keep his word, shoot the people anyway. Like they’re nothing but animals.” I notice Ashley’s eyes are about as wide as grapefruits when the waitress is done talking, and I’m pretty petrified myself.
“But you two wanted to know. I’m sorry if it was disturbing to you. I hate to tell it for that reason. You’re actually the first customers I’ve ever told it to. First customers that asked. Now, what can I get you two to drink?”
“I’ll just have a Coke, please.” I say, kind of pushing my menu away.
“Just a water for me, thank you.” Ashley says, kind of grabbing at her stomach.
“I’ll be right back.” She walks away and Ashley leans across the table.
“I don’t feel very hungry anymore.”
We get up and leave after she brings us our drinks, and tell her that something came up, and that we’re terribly sorry. We get back in the car and James asks what happened, and we tell him.
“I wouldn’t want to eat there either, after hearing something like that. Where to then?”
“The closest McDonalds you can find.” Ashley says.
We drive for another two hours or so, the entire time, Ashley is picking on James, like James is her uncle or something. Like they really are related. He picks on her right back, and we’re all laughing at something one of them says. I don’t feel like a third wheel though, because James picks on me too. But I don’t pick back, because the only things I can think of to say are racist, and that won’t bare well with him or Ashley.
We pull up to this hotel in the middle of a city that I’m not familiar with, but everything looks very fancy and nice. Like we just landed in Oz. I ask her where we are, and she says the magician never reveals her secrets. I tell her I hope it’s better than the last secret, and she looks like she’s about to be sick. We walk inside and the hotel is gigantic, with a ceiling that looks like planes could pass through if they made the windows big enough. Then I start to think about the birds outside the library window. How many dead birds made their home outside of these windows? “How many of them flew away?”
“Hi, we need to check in. Should be under Arthur Mitchell.” Ashley says as the man behind the counter scrolls through lines and lines of things on the computer.
“Yes, Mitchell, party of two. You will be staying in the executive suite tonight. Your bellboy will take everything you have up for you, if you don’t mind.” He points to a black boy, wearing a little red hat, but he definitely doesn’t look happy doing his job. Carrying up bags of luggage for rich people and families of ungrateful little fucks. I remind Ashley to tip him well, since I didn’t have any cash on me. She gives him a ten, and he smiles and says thank you, and nods, and tells us to enjoy our stay.
“Okay, what the fuck.” I look at the room and it’s huge. You could fit eight of my apartments in here. There’s a pool on the porch, a Jacuzzi beside it, a huge kitchen that looks like it was made for a chef, and dark hardwood floors that ran through the entire place.
“Do you like it?”
“How could I not like it? I’d be fucking insane. How much did this cost you?”
“It didn’t cost me anything. Cost my dad about four thousand dollars though. He writes it off as a business expense so it all evens out.” She goes and opens up the French doors leading out to the porch.
“I didn’t tell you to bring swim trunks because I didn’t want to give away the surprise, but there are about five pairs in my luggage.” I pick her up and kiss her so hard on the lips that I’m afraid we might mold together.
“This is wonderful. Very nice.” I go out to the porch and look down. We must be eighteen stories up, if not more. I can’t remember where the elevator stopped at.
“Are you okay?” Ashley says, and she puts her arms around my back.
“Yeah, just a little afraid of heights is all.” I look down.
“Don’t worry. I think even if you did jump, they’d have someone down there to catch you. Four thousand dollars for two days’ worth of spending guarantees that sort of thing.” She turns around and kicks her foot in the water.
“It’s warm. Want to go for a swim?”
“In a minute. Where is James staying tonight?”
“He’s staying in a regular room. We tell him he can stay in a nicer room, but he says he’s fine with just the normal, one bed, and basic cable room.”
“I like James. He seems like a nice guy.”
“He really is. He’s done a lot for the family.” “What do you mean?”
“When my dad used to come home drunk, James would drive him. One time, I told him that he used to hit my mom after he’d drive him home. So James turned around and looked at me and said that if he ever laid a finger on me, to tell him, and that he’d come and take care of it.”
“What do you think he would’ve done?”
“I don’t know. My dad and him have always been close. James knows all of my dad’s secrets. God only knows what he could’ve done. Could’ve ruined him completely. Made him lose his business, get him put in prison, anything really. I wasn’t afraid of my dad as much after that.”
“Can we invite him up tomorrow to swim in the pool?”
“Ha, yes. Now go get your trunks on.”
We swim around in the pool for about thirty minutes, until we’re both too tired to swim anymore. It was strange, being so high up that nothing was above us. I’ve never felt that way before. Just swimming around the pool, looking up all I can see are the moon and the stars, what few stars I can make out. It was a full moon, so it lip up the sky, and the moon was so close that I was afraid it will fall on us at any moment. It reminds me of that scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart says he could lasso the moon. I’ve always wondered what my life would be like if I was never born. If I never came to be. I always thought of that movie in reverse, like what if the angels were showing him how great life was without him? And then at the end, he decides to jump, and the angels have little demon tails crawl out from under their robes. My imagination is a sick animal.
“What are we doing tomorrow?” I ask, laying in the bed with our robes on.
“Anything you want to do.”
“I don’t even know where we are.”
“Then that’s the best way to find out where you want to go.”
That night we make love, and it wasn’t like sex with all of the other girls I had ever been with. It feels different. Like it was okay. Like I could be myself, and I could let go. She has a beautiful body, and when she would orgasm, she would dig her nails into my back and then release. By the time we were done, I had nail marks all down my back, and one of them was actually bleeding. But the moment we were done, I didn’t feel like getting up and leaving. I didn’t feel like rolling over and falling asleep. I just felt like lying there with her, holding her in my arms until we both fell asleep, and that’s what happens.
I wake up in the middle of the night, it was about four, and I walk out and sit on the porch and think, I wish Patrick were here to see this room. I wish Patrick were here to hear me talk about how much I like Ashley. But then, a sort of odd feeling falls on me, when I start thinking about him and Sarah and their relationship. I thought for sure they were going to get married. Sarah was perfect for him, and they loved each other. But Sarah probably just wanted out. Or maybe there were things going on behind closed doors that I didn’t know about. Maybe Patrick was doing drugs, or maybe she was doing drugs, or maybe they would fight when I left, to keep up the appearance of a loving relationship. Then I start thinking, what if Ashley is exactly like Sarah? What if she just fools me completely, and then starts fucking another guy, like Jessica did, like Sarah did. “You can’t put everyone into that category.” Patrick’s words are haunting me, because what he believed, what he felt was true, turned out to be a lie.
I lean over the balcony and stare down, and things are still going on down below. There are still parties being had, there are still people rolling into the front of the hotel, and checking in. It’s like life never stops here, and that it just keeps on going and going, and no one ever sleeps, because sleep is for people with boring jobs. I start wondering, what it would be like to work at a hotel, to always have something to do, even at four in the morning. The parties that go on in rooms, and the room service delivered to orgies, or rooms where everyone is doing lines off of a passed out girl’s back, and laughing their asses off about it. Or the gentle rooms, the ones filled with families on vacation who just want a good night’s sleep before going off on adventures tomorrow. Or rooms where old black chauffeurs are sleeping.
I can’t go back to sleep now, because the cold air is already in my body, and I’m already wide awake. I can’t wake up Ashley, and ask her to come keep me company, because that might get me in trouble, and I don’t want to be in trouble with Ashley. Why did I snap at the old man on the pier? Maybe he reminded me of my grandfather, after the dementia had made home in his mind. Couldn’t remember anything. Who he was, who I was, where he was. He was just lost, and maybe that’s what the guy on the pier was. Lost. And I was just trying to help him find his way back to reality.
I go to the living room and watch TV with the volume so low that I have to move the seat to where my face is basically on the screen. Nothing good is ever on at four in the morning, so I turn to the news station, where things are happening all over the place, but they only really cover what they think is important. There are a lot of riots in the Middle East, over some religious whatever, but they don’t stick on the story long enough for you to find out. They do however go into a ten minute spiel about how some fat celebrity got skinny, and how she’s an inspiration to fat kids all across America, and if you want to be skinny, you should follow her diet. Which they fail to mention, most likely consists of cocaine and bulimia. She would eat a low calorie diet, go the bathroom, throw it up then before she left, she would do a line off the counter. But that’s not the diet program they can talk about on the news. This woman now has a whole new diet program that people are falling for that’s low on carbs, and high in protein, and if you eat the right amount, you’ll lose ten pounds in two weeks. But they always forget to mention the exercise you’ll need to do, because if you don’t exercise, you’re not going to lose shit, and your fat ass will just be ignoring bread and eating meat, and you’ll throw your remote at the TV for lying to you, and you’ll probably stay fat for the rest of your fat life, because that’s what most fat people do. Unless you get gastric bypass surgery and then you have flabs of skin falling off your bones, and you look like a big pile of gelatinous skin.
Ashley wakes up around seven and staggers into the living room, where I’m still watching the news, and my anger has subsided as much as possible, and she squeezes herself in to the chair beside me.
“Whatcha watching?” She yawns.
“Some boring news about boring things. Why are you up so early?”
“I usually wake up around this time. No matter when I go to sleep.” She yawns again.
“You’re like a farmer.”
“Want me to order breakfast from room service?”
“Can we?”
“Yeah, it’s all charged to my dad’s account any way. He won’t care.” She picks up the phone and calls, and then tells them to hold on.
“What do you want to eat?”
“Anything good.” She picks the phone back up.
“Okay. Are you there? Can we have two anything goods?”
We eat, and then we go to James’ room and wake him up and Ashley orders him to drive around town until we find something interesting to do. He laughs, and tells us to walk. Then he says that the city is full of interesting things you can’t see from the window of a car. Then he adds that a good mugging might set her straight. She gives him the leftovers from our breakfast, and he closes the door.
Walking around, the city is alive and it seems like every place looks brand new, and is doing well. Like the recession completely jumped over this city, and just landed everywhere else. There are no homeless people begging for money, and that actually makes me a little sad. Everyone in this city is well off enough to where there is no poverty. It feels like we drove to some secret city, where everything is nice and perfect, and it’s its own little Utopia. It almost feels fake, like it’s all an illusion, that when I walk by somewhere, the second I pass it, it turns to shit. But I turn around and it’s all the same. We stop at a candy shop that Ashley claims has the best chocolate she’s ever had, and I try it and she’s right. It’s better than anything I’ve ever had. Then we go to this arcade, that looks like it should be doing poorly, but it’s not. The games there are all free, but you have to buy something to eat. So she buys a hot dog and I buy a hot dog, and we give it back to the people and we play shooting games for an hour and a half. The entire time I’m playing, I’m not really there. I’m not really here. I feel like my mind is still back at the hotel. That I can’t take in everything I’m seeing, because everything here is too good and too perfect. Soon I’ll wake up in the hospital, and the bed to my left will be empty and the bed to my right will have an old sleeping woman in it. And Patrick’s funeral will be in two days, but Patrick’s funeral already happened, so I already know how that’s going to go. I’m going to take too many Valium and forget it happened.
“Are you okay?” Ashley says, snapping her fingers.
“Yeah, can we sit down somewhere?” She nods and we go outside and find a little coffee shop and sit outside there, and she orders a cappuccino and I order nothing, and the waitress gives me an arrogant look.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just. I don’t know. I feel like I don’t deserve this.”
“Why would you feel that way?”
“Because, my life has been pretty shitty as of late, and then you bring me here, and you put me in this lovely hotel, into this beautiful city, and I’m having a lot of fun, but I feel like I shouldn’t be. I feel like I should be in my apartment right now, lying in bed, depressed. But I’m not, and it makes me feel like I’m not paying Patrick the respect I should be.” I breathe out.
“Do you really think that Patrick would want you to be sad? All suicidal and what have you. Do you really think he’d want you moping over him and being all depressed?”
“I’m not sure. The Patrick I knew became different when he did what he did. Maybe the real Patrick was selfish, and he would want me to be sad, and depressed, and maybe he would want me to kill myself so I could join him, because he’s all lonely in the afterlife.”
“The Patrick you knew, the Patrick you grew up with….that’s the real Patrick. The Patrick that did what he did wasn’t the real Patrick. It was a skewed version of him. It was Patrick out of his mind. It was a situational Patrick. I met Patrick a couple of times, and each time I met him I could tell he was a good friend to you. He lied to me when I ran into him the first time to cover your ass. That’s something not a lot of friends would do. Most friends would just shrug, and say he must not be interested. But he didn’t. So shut up and have fun, because this is a vacation from the shit life you had back at school. And this is a vacation from the shit week you had. And you deserve it, more than anyone I know.” She looks at me for a while after that, and I don’t have anything to say.
I eventually grab her hand and hold it on the table, and then pat it down. Then I smile at her and she smiles back at me, and I think for a brief moment, that she’s someone I can trust now. I’ve only known her for two weeks, and I can already trust her. I’m genuinely happy around her, and that’s all that matters right now. If it weren’t for her, I would be back at the apartment, lying in bed, moping around, feeling sorry for myself. But she was my salvation from that, and I feel ungrateful. So I lean over and kiss her and she kisses me back, and then I just hold her there at the table until the waitress comes back with her cappuccino. After she finishes it, she looks at me.
“Where to next?”
“Wherever you’d like to take me.”
We spend the afternoon running around town and we stop at a zoo and I get to see a giraffe for the first time in my life. There are plenty of animals, all looking as happy as they can be. Like they enjoy the pens they’re in. Like they enjoy captivity, and it’s the first time I’ve seen animals that seem happy being in a zoo. She’s in love with the aquarium part though, and keeps on looking at the fish and following them with her fingers. It’s like she’s stargazing, pointing out different species and telling me about them. What they do, what they eat, where they are from. The ones she doesn’t know she makes up a story for.
“That’s a Peatree fish. They’re from New Mexico. Only live in the freshwater there. They eat tacos mainly, and sometimes, quesadillas.” There’s a shark in one of the tanks, but I never find out what type of shark it is, and she doesn’t make up a story for it because she’s afraid of sharks.
“It’s what I get for watching Jaws a week before I went to the beach.” She says.
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“Jesus, your parents let you watch that stuff?”
“Yeah, my dad didn’t seem to care. None of it scarred me for life. I watched a ton of movies with violence and blood when I was in Elementary school. Really desensitized it for me. I can watch them now and not be scared at all.”
“Lucky you. The Shining still scares the shit out of me.”
“That’s because you’re a ten year old trapped in the body of a twenty one year old.” She laughs, but the comment shakes me up a bit for some reason.
We go out to dinner with James to an Italian place that has the best lasagna I’ve ever tried, and James just orders an appetizer. I ask him why he doesn’t take advantage of his free meals, and he looks at me for a while and then says that he didn’t have much growing up, so he doesn’t need much now that he’s old. I ask him why he wasn’t married too, and apparently, that’s a touchy subject, because he was married, to his high school sweetheart for fifteen years, until she passed away in her sleep. They never had kids, and the doctors never really told him what happened, just that she couldn’t breathe anymore. He asked them why she didn’t try to wake him up, and they said she probably did, but that he was just sleeping too deep. So now, every time he goes to sleep, he thinks about her, and ever since, even the slightest noise, or creak will wake him up. I tell him that makes him a good security system in case anyone ever tries to break in to his house. He just smiles at me and nods.
Back at the hotel, Ashley orders a bottle of wine from room service, and we just drink wine and fool around the entire night. We get in the Jacuzzi, but she says it’s too hot, and so she jumps in the pool, which she says is too cold. So I jump in after her and hold onto her until she warms up. Fireworks are going off somewhere, and we can see them jump into the sky and pop, and we are so close, that it’s like we can grab the sparks if we want to.
When I was eight, I went to a party with my parents and there were fireworks. It was some Fourth of July barbecue bullshit thing that my father’s company held, and seeing as he was an executive he had to be there. They sort of just let me run around and be by myself, because they expected me to play with the other kids there, but I just sat by a tree and watched. There was this girl there, who was really pretty, and I really wanted to get up and talk to her and play around with her and her friends, but I was nervous, and I was eight years old, so I just let the butterflies fly around in my stomach until they died. When they started the fireworks, everyone was watching them go off, and not really paying attention to anything else. One of the last fireworks, one of the big ones was trying to go off, and they were having trouble getting it stuck into the ground. When they finally lit it, it slanted and hit a crowd of people standing by. A lot of them just had second degree burns, and walked away with just a quick visit to the hospital and some burn ointment, but the girl…she got hit directly. It was odd that I was upset about it, seeing as all I did was notice her, and admire her from a distance. We never spoke, I had no idea what her name was. I knew absolutely nothing about her, except that she was the daughter of some low level employee who worked there. But, it made me more sad than it should have. I remember she had on a pretty dark blue dress, and had lace in her hair. And I can remember the length of the dress, and where the lace was and how it was tied, and every other thing about her except for her face. I saw her obituary in the paper, and the picture was from when she was a baby. I tried finding a picture of her, asked my dad even, but there was nothing. Maybe I should blame her for all of my relationship troubles. My troubles with women as a whole belong all to this faceless girl. Ashley goes into her purse and digs out a pack of cigarettes.
“I didn’t know you smoked?”
“I don’t really. I just smoke a cigarette every once in a while. Hell, I think I’ve had this pack since May or June” she says.
“Can I bum one off of you?” I ask and she hands me one.
“I didn’t know you smoked either.”
“I don’t. I never light them. Ha, I just let them hang out of my mouth and tell stories. Stories are always more interesting when the person telling them has a cigarette in their mouth.”
“Tell me a story then” she says as she hops down and sits on the side of the pool.
“What type of story?”
“Hmmm. I want a scary story.”
“Ah, a scary story. Well, I could start with the day I was born…”
“Shut up.” She splashes water at me.
“If you do that again, you might put my cigarette out.” I grin, and then start to think. “Okay, I’ve got one. Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. Once there was a family living in the mountains. They all looked alike, because they were all inbred, and they were all hideous. You couldn’t walk by them on the street without thinking about throwing up. They had a cabin at the foot of a mountain, and every December the father and the son would go and shoot anything they could find to eat. Deer, bear, raccoon, you name it, they shot it and ate it. So this one day, they’re ou