A Permanent Member of the Family

THE GREEN DOOR

The Piano Hollywood is a piano bar squeezed between the casino and the hotel at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, and like I deal cards instead of drinks the guy wants me to tell him the rules for Texas Hold’em. I know the rules, of course — who doesn’t?

This guy doesn’t. He’s a somewhat oversized, maybe fifty-year-old pear-shaped dude with pink skin and a thinning gray-blond comb-over. He’s wearing a blue-on-gold striped bow tie and a tan tropical-weight suit that at first I think is J. C. Penney or Sears, only when I have a chance to check the lines and workmanship close up I decide it’s quality garb, nice cloth, probably Italian with a two-K setback, and the problem is not the suit, it’s the guy’s Sears, Roebuck body.

He’s on his second Long Island iced tea when he pops the Texas Hold’em question. It’s early, a little after four in the afternoon, and the Piano is quiet — the day-trippers from the Fort Lauderdale and Miami old-age homes are over at the slots giving away their social security checks and the high rollers like bats in their caves are just waking up — so I give him the short form. I tell him about hole cards, the burn card, which amateurs sometimes think is the dealer cheating, but it’s the opposite. I describe the preflop and the flop and the turn and the river, by which time the guy’s eyes are glazed. He’s going to get skinned eight different ways, I think. I tell him he should watch a few games before putting any chips on the table. But then I lie and say it’s like seven-card stud, only simpler. For some reason a part of me doesn’t feel like protecting the guy from himself.

He thanks me a little too much and orders another Long Island iced tea. I’ve got my back to him, jiggering the contents into an ice-filled glass — vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, sweet-and-sour mix and a splash of Coke. It’s an alcohol mash-up for drinkers who don’t like the taste of alcohol but want to get wasted. While I’m pouring the mix into the shaker, out of nowhere he asks me in a too-loud voice, “Where can a fellow find himself some interesting sexual companionship for a few hours?” He’s southern, Georgia or South Carolina, with a suburban, gated-community accent. You see a lot of them down here, men and women both, mostly good Christians sniffing for stuff they can’t get back home.

I whack the shaker once and fill the glass from it, making sure there’s a signature touch of fizz at the top, and plant a lemon wedge on the edge and set it in front of him. “Depends,” I say.

“On what, pray tell.” He takes a sip of his drink, closes his eyes and smiles appreciatively, like he’s a connoisseur of Long Island iced teas and this one’s a ten.

“Depends on how much you want to spend. And whether you have a car and are willing to drive down to South Beach or over to Fort Lauderdale or need to stay here on the rez. You bedding down at the Hard Rock?” I ask him.

He says yes, he’s at the Hard Rock on business, but he has a rental car and can drive to wherever the women are. He calls them “ladies of the night.” I can’t tell if he’s being funny or is just a total cracker asshole. I’m in my sixties, and it’s the first time I’ve heard the expression.

“Also it depends on what sort of action you’re looking for,” I say.

He sips his drink with his eyes closed again. “I wouldn’t mind a variety of activities. Something a little de trop, if you know what I mean.”

I don’t speak French but I get his drift. I explain that if he wants something other than the two or three more popular items on the menu he’ll probably have to leave the rez, because the Seminoles run a pretty tight ship. “They’re first and foremost in the gaming industry, you understand. They don’t mind a working girl or two trolling the casino or the strip malls, so long as the girls are discreet and do their transacting in private, but the Seminoles are businesspeople and need to look squeaky clean. Even if they’re not, exactly.” I can add that because, although I’m told I look like a Seminole, I’m Jewish and am paid by the Piano, which is independently owned by Brits from Hong Kong.

“That’s why I’m here!” he says. “To do business with the Seminoles! I’m hoping to open a chapel and meditation center at the resort. My partners and I are franchising prayer and meditation centers at Indian casinos all across the country. We’ve got over sixty up and running and another twenty-seven under contract.”

“Sort of like fast food franchises?”

“In a sense, yes. The Indians really get it. They’re a very spiritual people, you know, the Indians. The true genius of America, however, is marketing,” he goes on. “We use Starbucks as a template. And the Hard Rock Cafe itself. The only difference is that our product is not coffee or food and alcohol or musical acts, and it’s certainly not gambling. Our product is nondenominational spiritual space.”

“A product that’s invisible. Very cool. Any complaints, you can blame the customer. Better than selling bottled tap water,” I say, kidding him a little. Although I’m an observant Jew in some ways, I’m very secular in others and don’t believe in anything that’s invisible, except atoms and molecules, and even about them I’m agnostic.

“Let’s go back to our previous conversation,” he says. “Concerning the ladies of the night.”

“Okay. But first tell me how you actually make money from these spiritual spaces. Do people have to pay to pray?”

“The casino pays us, naturally. It’s the same as if we rented them an attractive fountain for the lobby or a big tropical fish tank. It embellishes the environment. It elevates the ambience. The design and arrangement of the furnishings, the altars and wall decorations all follow the ancient principles of feng shui. Which is good for luck, you know. Gamblers need luck. It’s a pop-up structure, so we own and maintain the space. There’s also a donation box for the users of the space, the beneficiaries, to express their appreciation.”

“Like a gratuity?”

“You could say that. We have a regional team that comes around every week to empty the donation boxes, and it does add up, yes, indeed. Casinos are full of troubled people looking for spiritual relief and uplift, and when they find it they are grateful and like to express their gratitude. But our main source of income is the monthly rental fee for the space itself. Now, my friend, back to our previous subject.”

I’m actually more interested in these pop-up nondenominational chapels than our previous subject, but he’s the customer. I ask him again what on the sexual menu interests him. Is he into meat loaf, mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Or does he want something more exotic?

A tall, wiry kid in his mid-twenties with a storm cloud in front of his face has settled into a stool three down from my guy and is half listening to our conversation with what looks like disapproval. He has one of those five-day beards designed to demonstrate the high volume of his testosterone flow. I know the kid slightly, name’s Enrique. Dominican, I think. Speaks good English with only a slight accent. Comes into the Piano once every ten days or so and stops off for a drink or two before heading into the casino. Doesn’t talk much. I believe he’s into low-ball roulette. Owns a string of car washes, he told me once, a small-time businessman on the rise, not the type who’d work for someone else. I’ve never seen him crack a smile. Authority issues, probably. Can’t say I’m drawn to him.

I toss him a nod to let him know I’ll take his order in a second, but also to cue my guy that if he wants to talk about ladies of the night he should keep it down or else talk in code. For all I know, Enrique’s actually an undercover cop. Because of the casino and hotel there’s all kinds of plainclothes and undercover cops lurking around, private security guys, local and state, even feds.

Bowtie glances over at Enrique, seems to catch my point and tells me in a low voice that he’s interested in some real hot Thai food. “Spicy and burning hot!” he empasizes. Then he turns on his stool 180 degrees, grins at Enrique, winks and says, “Know any place nearby, friend, where a white man can eat Thai or maybe Polynesian?”

Enrique snorts and slips him a slim smile. “You talking Thai men or Thai women? Maybe you’re talking fat Polynesian boys,” he says and barks a laugh without smiling and shakes his head like he can’t believe my guy is a serious person. I’m not sure he’s a serious person myself, but his personality sticks to me like Velcro. I’m a bartender, I take people as they come. I don’t believe anything they tell me, and I forget them when they go. But something about this guy appeals to me and at the same time turns me totally off. Makes me want to help and hurt him simultaneously. Something about him confuses me.

“White man,” Enrique says to himself and snorts again. He turns and shows his back to us. On his neck he’s got the tattooed top of a porpoise done in Japanese woodcut style leaping out of his gray silk T-shirt. His shiny black hair is pulled tight into a short ponytail that tickles the porpoise’s nose. I go over and take his order, which he gives without looking at me. Vodka martini. Straight up. Ketel One. Extra dry. Three olives.

Enrique knows what he likes.

Bowtie says to him, “What’s your name, friend?”

He pulls out his iPhone, makes like he’s checking his e-mail. “Enrique,” he says. “What do peoples call you, man?” He doesn’t look up from his phone. “Whitey?”

“Heck, no! Allyn. Spelled A-L–L-Y-N, pronounced Allen, as in…,” he says and looks at the ceiling. “I can’t think of any famous Allens. Woody Allen? Anyhow, if spelled with a Y it’s a Gaelic name and means ‘precious one.’ From that you could surmise that I was an only child, Enrique, and you’d be right.”

Enrique looks at me and says, “Tell Precious about the Green Door.”

“You think?”

“Sure. He want a sexual buffet, he should go to the Green Door. Precious, you can get off any way you want at the Green Door.”

This exchange has hooked Allyn at the lip — his head is tilted to one side and his gaze switches from me to Enrique and back to me, like one of us is about to hand him the keys to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Allyn says to me, “That true? Wow! Where is it, the Green Door? What is it, a nightclub? A sex club?”

I explain that it’s just a bar located in a minimall on the outskirts of town. It looks like a normal neighborhood sports bar on the outside, but inside at the rear of the place there’s this green door, and like the song says, you knock three times and when the door is opened a crack you say, “Joe sent me,” and they let you in. “Never been there myself. But I’ve heard no matter what you’re into you can find it behind the green door. Girls in schoolgirl uniforms, cougars, fatties, black, white, and, yeah, Thai. Probably fat Polynesian boys too, and contortionists, rubber suits, whips, ropes, the whole carnival of sex acts. At least that’s what I heard. Never been there myself.”

I can see he doesn’t quite believe me, like it’s too good to be true, and I suppose for a guy like him, a Christian dad and husband, a businessman who’s never patronized any club nastier than a country club, it is too good to be true. He purses his lips, deep in thought.

“How do you know what they like?” he wonders. “How do you ask them what they want?”

Enrique says, “Fuck, man, they ask you what you want! You the fucking customer, man. It’s like ordering a drink in a fucking piano bar.”

“Got it!” Allyn says. But I can tell he’s not at all sure of what he wants. He’s probably not even sure of what he wants at home in bed with his wife and waits instead for her to tell him what she wants, then does his manly best to give it to her. Which is why tonight he’s wandering down the darkened alleys of his mind to the Green Door. He’s spent too many years postponing desire, cultivating fantasies and turning himself into a sexual window-shopper to know what he really wants. Like me, maybe. Only with me it’s about life in general and not just sex. Could be that’s why the guy both attracts and repels me.

Enrique takes a careful first sip of his martini. He nods with approval and says to me, “Good martini. Tell Precious to keep his wallet in his hand when he’s getting off.”

I don’t want to call him Precious so I just say, “Keep your wallet in your hand when you’re getting off, man.”

“Got it!” Allyn says again.

“And keep an eye on your watch. That’s a nice watch,” I say.

“Movado,” he says. “Top of the line.”

IT’S A FEW MINUTES after six, still early, and Allyn’s at work on his fourth Long Island iced tea. It looks like he’s not going to make it to the Green Door. Not tonight anyhow. His eyelids are drooping and he’s smiling at his reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. Enrique’s halfway through his second martini and is unto himself, reading the Miami Herald sports page. At the moment, however, despite the hour, the Piano is a happening place. A huge bus has pulled in to the casino and unloaded a couple dozen young giants, most of them black, with twenty or more huge duffels, and a half-dozen normal-sized older men, most of them white. According to their blue and white T-shirts and hoodies, they’re the basketball team and coaching staff from Daytona State College. Probably in town for a Suncoast Conference NJC double-A game against Broward College, where there’ll be scouts in the stands from Division I teams like Miami or FSU working the junior college circuit. Like the guy said, this is America, and we’ve got a genius for marketing.

The young giants mingle in the lot by their bus and gawk longingly through the glass doors at the bars and restaurants and casino beyond, while their coaches and handlers check them in and eventually herd them inside the hotel into elevators and send them up to their rooms. As soon as they’re gone, the coaches and handlers head straight for the Piano, where they take over a large table in the corner with an unobstructed view of the fifty-two-inch flat-screen opposite the corner where the piano is located. I grab the remote from under the bar and flip the channel off Judge Judy onto ESPN, and the whole crew locks onto the screen with mouths open like a nest of baby birds waiting to be fed.

By now the six-to-closing shift has hit the floor, Tiffany and Alicia, the Mutt and Jeff of waitresses, the long and the short of it. Which is a good thing because, in addition to the Daytona State coaching staff, eight or ten slim young dudes have just sailed in. They want champagne. They want to hang out with the piano at the Piano. It’s their fourth night here at the hotel and their first night off from performing at the Hard Rock with Cher, who is rumored to have taken the entire top floor of the hotel for herself and is having everything sent up. No one on the staff in any of the casino bars and restaurants can claim to have seen her in person up close except for a few waitresses and some stagehands who glimpsed her when she was being helped on- or offstage by one of her many assistants.

These guys tonight are Cher’s backup singers and dancers, and they’re lookers, naturally. They’re sharp L.A. dressers with perfect rotisserie tans and matching razor-cut haircuts and bodies that won’t quit. They’re all wearing tight black trousers like toreadors and puffy-sleeved shirts in various pastel colors that should be called blouses, not shirts, and they don’t stand around and drink and brag to each other or hit on strangers like most male customers. Instead they wave their hands in the air and talk in staged voices like they’re about to break into a Liza Minnelli song. They flounce and bounce like the tiled floor is a trampoline. They’re performers and can’t stop.

I enjoy listening to them and watching them move. They make me want to sing and dance myself, even if I can’t carry a tune and am heavy-footed and have a lousy sense of rhythm. I’m sixty-four and though in my youth had the requisite looks, I never acted the way they do, and now I sometimes wish I had. Not necessarily the gay part, but the loud, dancing, showing-off part. The flash and flamboyance. It looks like fun.

Too late now, though. The flashiest thing I ever did in my youth was audition for a porn movie production company in South Beach when I was thirty-five, divorced and broke. I have a seven-inch dick, but they said it had to be seven and a half, so I took a forty-hour mixology course at the New York Bartending School of South Florida instead. The rest is history. I’m still divorced, but no longer broke. I still have a seven-inch dick, but I’m not thirty-five anymore.

AROUND SEVEN, Allyn seems to break the mirror’s hold on his attention. He shakes his head and blubbers his lips like he’s waking from a nap and asks for driving directions to the Green Door. I make him wait while I finish topping off seven flutes of Moët & Chandon for Cher’s chorus line. Mutt and Jeff tray the flutes and haul ass. When I give Allyn the directions I say he should be careful driving. After four Long Island iced teas, if the cops stop him no way he’ll pass a Breathalyzer.

He sticks out his chest and says, “Are you intimating I’m drunk?”

Enrique folds his paper and says, “Back the fuck off, white bread, or I’ll cut your fucking nuts off.”

Both Allyn and I say, “Huh?”

It’s not clear whose nuts he’s threatening to cut off or why. I assume they’re Allyn’s, but Allyn’s giving me a concerned look like he thinks they’re mine.

Enrique furrows his brow like he’s going to cry. He looks first at me, then at Allyn, and says, “Jesus Christ, I don’t know what made me say that. I’m really, really sorry, man. I got this disease, it’s like a kind of autism and makes me say shit I don’t want to say. I apologize, man.”

I tell him no problem, and Allyn says the same, and then, as if to reassure him, Allyn invites Enrique to come along with him to the Green Door.

Enrique politely declines.

Allyn turns to me and says, “How about you, bartender? Care to join me at the Green Door and get sweaty wet with whatever or whomever you fancy?”

It strikes me that Allyn’s the one with the disease that makes people say weird shit they don’t mean, except that he means it. “No, thanks, man. I got too much to do here tonight.”

Enrique says, “Yeah? What’re you doing, killing people?”

“Naw, not tonight,” I say. “Actually, my replacement called in sick, so I’m stuck here till closing. Otherwise, yeah, I’d be out killing people.” Two can play at this game.

Allyn says, “Or hanging with me at the Green Door!” He lays a hundred on the bar and says keep the change and wobbles from the bar. I deduct sixty for the register and pocket the rest.

Enrique says, “No fucking way that dude’s going to end up at the Green Door.”

I ask him about this disease he’s got, if it comes and goes, or does he have to fight it all the time in order not to say shit he doesn’t mean.

“Only time I can forget it is when I’m sleeping. Sometimes I get tired of fighting it, like tonight, and just say fuck it, you know?”

I say I know. But what I really want to know, and don’t ask, is how it feels to suddenly blurt out whatever pops into your head. It must be like going behind the green door. It must feel really good to let yourself do that. It must in a way be fun, like being a glittery member of Cher’s chorus line swirling across the stage singing “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” which is what they’re singing now at the far end of the bar, one of them on the piano, the six others, arms over shoulders, in an actual chorus line, kicking left, kicking right, having a wonderful time performing that goofball of a song for each other and for anyone else in the bar who cares to watch and listen. The coaches all dig it, and Mutt and Jeff grin and watch, and even Enrique seems to like it. And me — maybe especially me, I like it.

IT’S TWO IN THE MORNING before I finally clear everybody out and get the bar washed and locked down and head for the employees’ parking lot on the other side of Seminole Way. I’m dragging my bony ass, but if I worked for one of the casino bars instead of the Piano I’d be serving drunks till dawn, so I’m not complaining, just saying.

As I cross the lot toward my Corolla, motion detectors automatically turn on the new ecologically correct LED streetlights, and after I’ve passed beneath they switch off behind me, one bright light handing me on to the next and then blinking out, all the way across the enormous, nearly empty lot. Palm trees along the sidewalk click and snap in the breeze. A quickie rain shower has cooled the air and clouds of steam rise from the lot as if the pavement is heated from below by fires in the devil’s workshop. I’ve crossed this lot thousands of times and never given it a nod, but tonight for some reason it’s spooky. Makes me edgy.

In my head I’m listening to Enrique and Allyn, especially Allyn, when I arrive at my car and get in. Over the course of the night I had maybe a dozen conversations with customers, some of them interesting, even a couple of them useful. Despite that, I can’t remember a one of them, except for my exchange with Enrique and Allyn at the start of the evening, which has stayed with me in a slightly irritating way, like a day-old bee sting.

I’m driving across the lot in the direction of the exit at Lucky Street, still running those guys’ words past my inner ears, when my headlights catch three men and a solitary Ford Fusion sedan with its front doors wide open parked at an angle across two adjacent spaces. Caught in the cone of my headlights the three figures are otherwise surrounded by darkness. They act like I’m not there or they don’t give a shit that I am. One of the three is jumping around and making big purposeful punching gestures like he’s reenacting a WWE wrestling match. He appears to be shouting at the other two, who stand off a few feet and watch him warily as if they’re not sure why he’s performing for them. They’re younger and smaller than he is — red-faced, unshaven Raggedy Andys, a fat one with a long braid who looks like a Seminole and a scrawny one who looks Hispanic. Homeless sunburnt junkies or rosy-faced drunks, I figure. South Florida’s largest minority. Next to the sedan they’ve parked a matching pair of grocery carts stacked with garbage bags filled with all their worldly goods.

The one making the wild gestures I suddenly realize is Allyn, my Long Island iced tea guy, who looks like he’s been mugged — bow tie undone, shirt unbuttoned to below his navel, the right sleeve of his jacket half torn off, the suit itself spattered with mud and what looks like spilled red wine or possibly blood, hard to tell in the glare of my headlights. His comb-over is fluffed up like he put his finger in a light socket. He’s got a couple of ugly blue bruises on his forehead and a purplish egg swelling below his left eye.

I’ve stopped my car maybe twenty feet away from him, still inside the parking lot with a high-curbed concrete island between my car and his rental. I reach over to lower the passenger’s-side window so I can talk to Allyn. He doesn’t look quite sane. But not exactly insane, either.

I get the window all the way down and holler, “Hey, man, you okay? You need help?”

He glances in my direction but doesn’t seem to recognize me. “I’ve had enough help for one night, thank you very much! Unless you’re the police and can arrest these two!”

“Allyn, it’s me, the guy who sent you to the Green Door, remember?”

The Indian and the Spanish guy edge slowly toward their carts, still keeping a wary eye on Allyn. He looks like he recognizes me now and takes a step in my direction, then sees the two homeless guys about to escape. “Not so fast!” he shouts at them. “We have some unfinished business to settle!”

The two freeze and switch their gaze from him to me and back again. Up to now they’ve probably been goofing on Allyn, the only guy around who seems crazier than they are. They’re thinking they can handle Allyn — they obviously already have — but not the two of us. And maybe I’m carrying a weapon. This is South Florida, after all, and anybody out this late is likely to be armed and could legally shoot them both and say he felt threatened by them. In fact, I have a loaded Smith & Wesson Bodyguard.38 in the glove compartment and could easily take control of this situation if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. And I don’t feel threatened.

“What’s happening here, Allyn?”

“They put something in my drink.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. At the Green Door! I woke up in my car, and these two were going through my pockets and taking off my watch.”

“What happened at the Green Door?”

“I said, they put something in my drink! Slipped me a mickey! Knockout drops or something!”

“So did you get what you wanted there?”

“I don’t remember anything! All I remember is going through the green door. Then suddenly I’m back here in my car and these two are taking my wallet and my Movado. And now I’m going to beat the shit out of them and take my fucking wallet and watch back!”

The Indian and the Spanish guy look mildly pissed is all, like this crazy dude interrupted a friendly parking lot Thunderbird nightcap. I say, “You guys take his wallet and his watch?”

They shake their heads no. Their eyes are half closed.

I say to Allyn, “Knockout drops? Slipped you a mickey? Give me a break, man. What kinda movies you been watching? You were shitfaced when you left the Piano. You probably never even got out of the parking lot. It’s called a blackout, asshole.”

I turn to the homeless guys, “Fuck him. He’s all yours.”

Then, for reasons I can’t know or name, I back my car off a short ways. I close the window, and everything comes to a halt, like I’m suddenly unplugged. No power. I just sit there behind the wheel and watch everything unfold like it’s happening in high def on a flat-screen with the sound off.

I can’t hear him, but I know from Allyn’s face and his bulging eyes that he’s gone back to yelling at the two homeless guys, and while he yells he dances a weird kind of jig, hopping from one foot to the other with his knees slightly bent. He’s flailing his arms and bobbing his head, almost like he’s having an epileptic seizure, except his movements are more or less coordinated and intentional. He’s gesturing with his hands for them to bring it on, c’mon, man, bring it on!

The Hispanic guy reaches into his front pocket and pulls out a small jackknife and opens the blade.

The Indian guy touches his friend on the arm and says something to him.

As if he hasn’t seen the Hispanic guy’s jackknife and doesn’t see the more serious hunting knife that the Indian has removed from a leather case strapped to his lower leg, Allyn keeps yelling and dancing a fat guy’s version of the Ali Shuffle.

The Hispanic guy reaches out with his pocketknife and slashes Allyn’s neck from below his right ear to his collarbone, and blood spurts from an artery. Allyn stumbles in his dance and takes one more hop, when the Indian punches his blade into Allyn’s belly and jerks it back. With his free hand the Indian pushes Allyn backward two steps. He falls onto the pavement. Blood pours from his mouth. He gurgles, goes silent, kicks both feet once and is still.

The two men wipe their blades on Allyn’s pant leg and put their knives away. Not once do they look my way. It’s like I’m not there, and in a way I’m not. They grab their grocery carts and disappear into the darkness. I drop my Corolla into gear and cross the parking lot to the exit, turn left onto Lucky Street and drive home.

I go to bed. I fall asleep quickly and sleep without dreams until nearly noon the next day.

A WEEK, maybe ten days later, I’m setting up the bar for the night, shining glasses with a towel, and Enrique strolls in and perches on his usual stool at the bar. Though he’s never done anything to make me personally dislike him, I can’t say I’m real happy to see him. He reminds me of shit I’d rather not think about.

I nod hello, and he says, “Vodka martini. Straight up. Ketel One. Extra dry. Three olives.” While I make his drink he eyes me, like he’s auditioning me for a job at a private club, and when I set it in front of him he says, “I appreciate how you make a martini, man.”

“Thanks,” I say.

When I start to move away, he says, “Kill anybody lately?”

“The fuck you going with that? Why’d you ask me that?”

“Hey, man, I’m sorry! I am really very sorry! Remember I told you sometimes I can’t help what I say out loud? It’s like I don’t even know I’m saying it and peoples can hear it, and then they get all weirded out and upset. I’m really sorry, man.”

“Forget it,” I say. “I guess we all say and do shit we don’t mean.”

I step away and go to work making his martini. I bring it to him and shake it down and pour.

“There’s some peoples who don’t say and do shit that they mean,” he says.

“Yeah? Like who?”

“Like that fucking cracker who was here last time, the dude in the bow tie who wanted to go to the Green Door. Remember him, man?”

“What did he not say?”

“That he was a fucking white racist, man. He didn’t say that, right? He didn’t have to.”

“What did he not do?”

“You know the answer to that, man.”

“I guess so. But tell me.”

“He wanted to fuck a fat Polynesian boy.”

“He coulda got what he wanted at the Green Door.”

“Nah. He passed out in his car in the parking lot. That dude, man, he never made it to the Green Door,” he says, laughing. He lifts his glass and takes the first sip. As the ice-cold vodka hits his brain, he cuts me a smile like he knows everything there is to know about me and says, “And you, you never killed nobody, man.”