Past Due

Chapter 31

“BACK IN THE day, Dude,” said Lonnie Chambers, his eyes wide with excitement, “when the business was really churning, we had us some parties. Girls, booze, spreads to make a sheik sweat. Shrimp, you never saw so much shrimp. Piles. Mountains. Dude. And that was just the shrimp. You should have been there.”

“Were you there?” I asked Chelsea.

Chelsea smiled, gave an expression of fake shock. “No girls allowed, at least no girlfriends allowed.” She sipped her blue martini. “A regular boys’ club.”

We were at the bar of the Continental, a smoky, swanky restaurant carved out of an old chrome diner. I knew the old place, I had eaten there, and generally to see a diner tarted up as some swank joint for a swank crowd made me angry and sad, but this diner had actually been foul, nowhere near as swell as the diner that still parked across the street. And so, as much as it pains me to say it, the Continental, with its power crowd and neon lights, with its padded walls and skewered olive light fixtures and frou-frou food was, actually, an improvement.

“The parties,” said Lonnie, jabbing at me with his lit cigarette, his rough voice rising above the hum of the crowd, “they always started with the cars. Long black limos the twins, that ran the thing, they rented to pick us all up. Each one stocked with alcohol, some powder, and a girl. A sort of stewardess who would plump your pillow, get you comfy, pour your drink, unzip your fly.”

“Lonnie.”

“Victor here asked what it was like back in the day, so I’m just telling him. Drinks, drugs, a long-legged girl with a mouth like a washing machine. And that was just the car. We had it going, Dude. And the chicks at home, they never knew a thing about it.”

“Don’t be stupid, Lonnie,” Chelsea said, standing from her stool at the bar. “We knew everything.”

“No way. No frigging way.” He tilted his head. “How?”

She picked up her glass by the stem, stretched her lovely neck, drained the last of her martini, placed the glass back on the bar. “We paid one of the regular whores to tell us.” She glanced at her watch. “I have to make a call.”

Lonnie’s forehead creased in puzzlement as she walked away from the bar, past the tables, toward the restrooms. She was tall and her back was straight when she walked, but, in the way she gripped her elbows as she moved, there was a sense of her holding herself together, and in her lovely eyes there had been the lovely sadness I had noted before. We both watched her go and then Lonnie shrugged, took a last drag of his cigarette, squashed it among the accordioned remnants of his priors.

“Could be. There wasn’t much they wouldn’t do for money.” A hearty laugh. “Wasn’t much at all. Dude, you really should have been there.”

“Lonnie, what would I have been?” I said. “Ten maybe?”

“Hell, it’s not like you needed a driver’s license. What with the limos driving us down the Black Horse Pike. Others would fly in from all over the country, from Boston, from Miami, from Phoenix. All coming to the same place to celebrate. There’d be a reason, usually a bachelor party, but I’ll tell you this, it was, all of it, just an excuse. Hell, a lot of these guys just got married so we could have the party. Wild times, man, wild. You want a bone?”

I declined. Lonnie shook another Camel unfiltered from his battered pack, lit it with a Harley-Davidson lighter. Lonnie smoked with the unconscious determination of an old lady playing the slots, one pull after another after another.

“The twins, they would put money in the casino cage for each of us, so as soon as we arrived we could stride onto the floor, tap into the account, and start throwing the dice. Some of the guys, they played blackjack, but I always liked the dice. It’s quicker, Dude, if you know what I mean? I figure if I was going to win I was going to win, but if I was going to lose, fine, let’s get it over with so we could get it on.

“Upstairs, the twins, what with all the money they was putting into the cages, would get comped a huge suite with all kinds of connecting doors. We called it the Elvis Suite. Fancy furniture, mirrored ceilings in the bedrooms, TV the size of a bull. There’d be about twenty of us up there, along with the food and the coke, ’ludes, dope, whatever, and anything we wanted to drink. And after all of us, we were jacked to the stars, the twins, they would stand up on a table with a bottle of champagne in each hand and make pep talks about the pots of money we were all going to make in the upcoming year. And then they would get to shaking the bottles with their thumbs over the tops and spraying us all. And we’d all start cheering and howling and barking like dogs. It would get louder, wilder, we’d be ripping our shirts off as we barked away. And then the girls would arrive.

“A dozen of them, really prime, you know what I mean. Not like the skanks for sale in Philly, no way. This was Atlantic City and the twins knew how to get the best. Dancing, stripteases, lesbian love, whatever game you was into. The music would be pumping, the girls would help themselves to the drugs, the clothes would come off, the shrimp would fly, things would spiral way out of control. And, Dude, it would go on and on and on. The secret was meth, a little meth you could go all night, and I used to score that myself for the boys. That was my special thing. And with enough drugs, after a while you wouldn’t know who you were screwing and you wouldn’t care. We would go on all night, dancing and screwing and getting high, until everything just collapsed like a burst balloon.

“In the mornings after, Dude, it was like a tornado had run through the place. Shrimp on the curtains, roast beef hanging from the chandelier, champagne sprayed over everything. Blood and semen, condoms on the ceiling. The guys would be asleep, sprawled under the table or half-on half-off the couch, pants down, drool and coleslaw falling from their mouths. And there was always a girl, picking her way among the fallen soldiers, looking for pieces of her clothing.

“I remember one of the twins taking me aside after one of them parties and saying, ‘You know, Lonnie, we just want to give the boys a memory they’ll have for the rest of their lives.’ And they did, those sons of bitches.” His eyeballs, red already, grew glassy with emotion. “And I miss it, all of it, every day. It was the time of my life, Dude. Yes it was.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Ah, you know,” he said, wiping a hand over his eyes and squashing his cigarette flat. “It was business. Business goes bad, that’s the truth of it.”

“Who were the twins?”

“Just two guys ran the business I worked in then.”

“Brothers?”

“Nah, just friends, They didn’t either of them look anything alike, but they always said they was Fric and Frac.”

“I’ll get the next round.”

“Not for me. I got to go. I got a meeting.”

“Motorcycle business?”

“Something like that. It was good talking to you, Dude. I’m glad we set this up.”

“So am I.”

“You find anything more about that dude you told us about? What was his name? Tommy something.”

“Tommy Greeley. Yeah, I did.”

“Good. That’s good. But be careful, Dude, it’s a scary world out there.”

He slapped me on the shoulder, slapped me so hard I almost fell off the stool. And then he left, just as Chelsea was walking back. They met away from the bar, talked, Lonnie turned his head to look my way as he said something, and then he was gone and Chelsea was walking toward me.