Derailed

FORTY-FOUR

I was standing on the corner of Crescent and Thirtieth Avenue.

In front of a place called the Crystal Night Club. It didn’t look like a nightclub. It was just an ex-VFW lodge — the pale imprint of “VFW Lodge 54” still lingered on the brick facing. But it was past midnight, and I could hear music inside. A Latin-looking man was throwing up on the sidewalk.

When I walked in, I was immediately aware that I wasn’t exactly in my element.

Remember that scene from Star Wars where the hero strolls into that alien bar? I felt like that. Only these aliens were of the terrestrial variety — the kind you see on the evening news when the INS conducts its periodic roundups on the border. The kind you see on any lawn crew on Long Island. If I hopped a plane to Santo Domingo and stepped off onto the runway and into the nearest bar, it might look like this.

I was pretty sure I was the only white American in the place. Possibly the only legal American, too.

Salsa music was blaring from two enormous speakers. Spanish was flowing freely around the room.

Everyone seemed coupled up, but they were oddly paired. The women were dressed up — short flashy skirts and high heels. The men wore dirty jeans and T-shirts. It took me a while to understand what was going on.

The women were hostesses. That’s the way one of them introduced herself—first in Spanish, huéspeda . Then in English, when I looked perplexed and she got a good look at me and realized I wasn’t her usual clientele.

For a moment she hesitated, as if she expected me to realize my mistake and leave. But when I stood there and waited politely for her to continue, she did.

“I’m Rosa,” she said. “Want a hostess?”

“Yes,” I said. “Fine.”

Return for a minute to that moment I was taken out of the hole in the ground that had once been the Fairfax Hotel.

I was laid on the sidewalk as they waited for the ambulances and doctors to arrive. They came out with other bodies; they placed a dying Vasquez next to me on the ground.

The fireman who laid him there was covered in soot. His eyes were like white ash on burning charcoal. He asked me if I was okay.

I said yes. I could hear the faint wail of a rushing ambulance. I knew I had just a few minutes.

When the fireman went back in for more bodies, I leaned over Vasquez as if I were comforting him. Seeing if he was all right. I put my hands into his pockets. First the front pockets, then the back.

In his front pockets was some change. A vial with white powder in it. Some matches.

His back pocket was bulging with his wallet. I quickly removed it and put it in my pocket.

I got up and left.

In the taxi to Forest Hills I rifled through it, returning the favor Vasquez has done for me in the Fairfax Hotel.

In this wallet: a phony police badge; a suspicious-looking driver’s license; more white powder wrapped in aluminum foil; two hundred dollars; a business card for something called the Crystal Night Club. Proprietor listed as Raul Vasquez.

On the back was some Spanish writing. Veinte-y-dos . . . derecho, treinta-y-siete izquierdo, doce . . . derecho.

The next morning, the morning I woke in blackface, I looked it up on-line. Google.com — Spanish Dictionary.

Once I translated the first word, I knew they were numbers.

Twenty-two right.

Thirty-seven left.

Twelve right.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t a football play.

This is the way it worked in the Crystal Night Club.

You ordered overpriced drinks, and Rosa talked to you.

That’s what the other men were doing.

Rosa explained it to me, as something to talk about.

“You ain’t no wetback,” she said. “That’s what we get in here. Usually,” she added, not wanting to offend me.

“Where do you come from?” I asked her.

“America,” she said, "where do you think?”

“No. I meant where do you live?”

“The Bronx,” she said. “All of us do. We get bused in.”

“Oh.”

“These guys” — she pointed around the room with evident disdain — “they live on crews. You know . . . like six to a room.”

“And they come here to drink.”

“Right,” she said with a little smile, as if I’d said something funny, “to drink. Want another?” she asked me, reminding me that that’s exactly what I was doing. Drinking.

I’d barely touched my ten-dollar tequila sunrise, but I said sure.

“They’re lonely,” she added after making a hand signal to the man behind the bar. He had a thick neck festooned with tattooed crosses. “They come here to like . . . you know, bullshit. They got no one to talk to. No one female, ” she said. “They like, fall in love with us, you know. They blow all their dinero. ” And she laughed and rubbed her fingers together.

“Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”

“Oh yeah . . . you understand. So what’s your story?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t have one. I just wandered in.”

“Yeah, well, that’s cool.”

Rosa was thick hipped and fleshy — most of the hostesses were. I was picturing Lucinda. I was wondering if she’d worked here, too; I took a gamble.

“Actually,” I said, and Rosa leaned closer, “I came in once before. I think.”

“You think? ”

“I was drunk,” I said. “I think it was the same place. Not sure.”

“Okay,” she said.

“There was this girl here.” I described Lucinda in detail, all the detail someone who’d spent countless hours staring at a woman would know. I left out things like her sexy pout and liquid eyes.

“Oh,” Rosa said. “You’re talking about Didi. ” But she said it in a way that made me think she hadn’t exactly liked Didi.

“Didi? Yeah . . . I think that was her name. Sure.”

“She was a fucking puta . . . a player, you know. . . .”

“No.”

“Oh yeah. She comes in and sees what’s what in like two minutes, right? Sticking her tits out . . . her skinny little ass . . . parading it for the boss. I could see what she was doing. I’m down like James Brown on this bitch, right? She’s here like two days, two fucking days, and she’s doing him.”

The boss. Raul Vasquez.

“Where is the boss?” I said.

Rosa shrugged. “Don’t know. He hasn’t been around. Why?”

“No reason.” And I thought: They don’t know. I had his wallet, and he wasn’t registered at the hotel. They had no name and no one to notify. No next of kin to break the news to.

“So, you married?” she asked me.

“No.”

I was trying to put it all together. I was trying to picture how it started. These poor wetbacks came into the Crystal Night Club to blow all their cash on hostesses who basically looked down on them. Lucinda was one of those hostesses. That faint accent I’d asked her about on the train—Spanish? But Lucinda hadn’t remained a hostess for long. She’d flashed her skinny ass instead and hooked up with Vasquez. You could see why he’d want to. She didn’t look like the rest of them here. She looked like someone who spent her day buying low and selling high in some office tower downtown. The kind of woman other white-collar commuters would drool over behind their morning papers.

Was it his idea, I wondered, or hers? Who got the idea — who looked around the depressing environs of the Crystal Night Club and saw the possibilities?

“You ain’t drinking,” Rosa said. “The rule is, if you don’t drink, I gotta talk to somebody else, okay?”

“I’ll order another,” I said, and Rosa smiled.

Maybe it was her. Didi. Maybe she saw how ridiculously easy it was to make these day laborers far from home fall in love with her and knew it would be even easier with guys like me. Married guys who weren’t far from home, but maybe were wishing they were. Guys who wanted someone to talk to just as much as these guys. Guys with real cash.

When the bartender brought over another tequila sunrise, I opened my wallet to pay.

Rosa said: “Widdoes? What kind of name is that?” She was looking at a piece of my new driver’s license. Yes, my first night as a new man. Charles Schine was dead.

“Just a name,” I said.

“It’s depressing,” she said. “Likewidows, you know. . . .”

“Yes, well, it’s spelled differently.”

“That’s true,” she said seriously.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked her.

“Over there — ” She pointed to a back hall. “Most of them use the sidewalk,” she said, and snorted. “You should smell it at four in the morning. They don’t know no better.”

“Well, I’ll use the bathroom,” I said.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

When I got up from the table, I saw the thick-necked man behind the bar staring at me. I walked to the back of the room, passing Colombian, Mexican, Dominican, and Peruvian men engrossed in conversation with their respective hostesses. The conversations were kind of one-sided, though, the men leaning over the tables and talking in slurred Spanish. I thought that my conversations with Didi had been pretty much like that, too.

One of the bathrooms said “hombres” on the door.

I walked in that one. There was a man kneeling over the toilet. I could smell his vomit.

I walked into a stall that had graffiti over every inch of it. Mostly in Spanish, but some English, too.

“I have an ten-inch dick,” someone had written.

I sat on the toilet and took a deep breath. I’d seen a third door here in the back hallway. His office?

I waited till the other man left, then I got up and walked back into the hallway.

There was no one there. I walked to the third door.

It wasn’t locked. When I opened it, its rusty hinges shrieked at me and I stopped and waited, my heart somewhere in my throat.

Nothing. The salsa music was pounding away out there.

I slipped inside and closed the door.

The room was dark. I felt for the light switch and found it just behind the door.

Yes, it was his office. Had to be. It wasn't much of an office, but there was a desk, a swivel chair, a beat-up couch, a file cabinet.

I was thinking about the man behind the bar. How he’d stared at me when I walked to the back hallway. The tendons on his neck had looked like thick strands of rope.

I scanned the walls — they were made of fake wood. Nothing there. No wall safe, for instance. No picture that could be hiding a wall safe. Those numbers on the back of his card — they had to be the combination to a safe. If not here, somewhere. He was dead, and I needed that money back. I had to chance it.

There was a ripped calendar hanging on the wall, but when I pushed it to one side there was nothing behind it.

I heard footsteps outside the door. I held my breath.

They kept going; I heard the bathroom door open and shut.

I tried the file cabinet—it was locked. The desk drawer was open. In the back of the drawer was a sheaf of yellowed newspaper. It was a bunch of clippings. The first was an old cover of Newsday. COMMUTER JUMPS OFF LIRR was the headline. There was a picture of a body wrapped in a white sheet, lying at the side of the railroad tracks in Lynbrook, Long Island. A somber-looking policeman was standing guard over it.

The actual article was there, too.

“A Rockville Center man apparently committed suicide last night by jumping off a Long Island Rail Road train,” the article began. It went on to say that he was married with three children, that he was a corporate lawyer, that he’d left no suicide note. He’d been experiencing some unnamed personal problems, a family spokesperson said. Other than that, there was no explanation. Witnesses on the train said the man — his name was John Pierson — was walking to the back of the train with other commuters in order to find a seat when he simply, and without warning, jumped.

I might’ve stopped reading right there, except one of the witnesses’ names caught my eye. The last person to see him alive — the one who actually saw him jump.

Raul. No last name given. It listed his occupation as bar owner.

The door opened.

The thick-necked man was standing there staring at me.

I was standing behind the desk with the newspaper clippings in my hand. The desk drawer was open.

“Astoria General,” he said softly.

“What?”

“The nearest hospital. So you know what to tell the ambulance driver.”

“I’m sorry . . . I was looking for the bathroom . . .”

“I’m going to have to fuck you up bad,” he said, still in that soft voice. “Two, three weeks in the hospital before you get out, okay?”

“Look, really, I was just . . .”

He closed the door behind him. He locked it.

He began to walk toward me.

I stepped back, but there was only wall behind me.

He stopped and took something out of his pocket. A roll of coins that he wrapped his right fist around.

He walked around the desk; he was close enough to smell.

Then I remembered what I had in my pocket. I pulled it out and flipped it open.

He stopped.

“Detective, NYPD,” I said. Vasquez’s phony police badge. I’d stuffed it into my pocket and almost, but not quite, forgotten about it.

“We have reports of illicit drug activity,” I said, wondering if that was how policemen actually spoke. I tried to remember the way Detective Palumbo had spoken to me that day in the office.

“There’s no drugs here,” the man said. “You got a warrant?”

I didn’t, of course, have a warrant.

“You just threatened me. Do I need a warrant to arrest you?”

“There’s no drugs here,” the man said. “I’m going to call our lawyer, okay?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m done.”

And I walked out right past him.

I counted in my head. One, two, three, four . . . wondering how many seconds it would take me to get out of the bar and onto the street. And how many seconds it might take him to reconsider letting me walk out without checking my badge again or asking me to wait for his lawyer to arrive. I was up to ten when I passed Rosa, who said, “Hey, where you goin’?” . . . fifteen when I walked through the door without answering her.