Slide

Three

Angela Petrakos had arrived in Ireland with big dreams, an engagement ring, and ten grand in cash. She also had a gold pin of two hands almost touching. The pin was her lucky charm, or at least it was supposed to be. She wore it everywhere she went, figuring the luck part would have to kick in eventually.

Her first day in Dublin she sold the engagement ring to a pawnshop and blew the proceeds in about a month. Then it was time to piss away the rest of her money. The ten thousand dollars had been Max’s “emergency fund,” a wad he’d kept hidden, with a roll of duct tape, in a shoebox in his bedroom closet since 9/11. Angela used to go to him, “What’s some money gonna do if they, like, drop the bomb?” and Max would come back with, “Who knows? I might have to bribe somebody to drive me out of the city or something.” Like he thought he’d simply drive through a nuclear wasteland. Had anything that bollix said ever made any sense? Had she really agreed to marry him? What the hell had she been thinking?

At first she stayed in the Clarence Hotel on the Quays in Dublin, and jeez, did that Liffey stink or what? The hotel was owned by U2, but had she seen Bono, or the Edge, or even a fucking roadie? Had she fuck.

When she’d arrived her money had seemed like plenty to get started with but hey, no one told her about this strong Euro. When she’d changed her Franklins, she couldn’t believe how it translated, almost cut her nest egg in half. And cash wasn’t her only problem. She’d been born in Ireland but raised in the States. In America, her accent was always recognized as Irish and a definite plus. Here they heard her as a Yank and kept busting her chops about Iraq. Like she sent the troops in. She didn’t even know where the shithole was.

One day she returned to her room and discovered her key card was no longer working. Beautiful, right? Bono was canceling world debt but not, it seemed, hotel bills. Leaving the hotel, down in the zero, she fingered the pin in her lapel. It was like a prayer she almost believed.

She needed more Euro and she wasn’t about to go looking for a job. After a string of bad jobs in America she’d had it with working. Besides, the demand for office assistants who typed twenty words a minute wasn’t exactly staggering. A man had always been her first step to money, to getting on track. Get a guy, get centered was her motto. The fact that men had fucked her over each and every time had slipped her mind.

She walked along Ormond Quay, passed the very fashionable Morrison Hotel. Unfortunately she didn’t have enough to buy a goddamn coffee in there. She continued, her hopes sinking as she watched the area take an Irish dive. Then she hit the fleabags, where the “non-nationals” were housed, and found the River Inn. It reminded her of some of the shitholes she’d seen on the Bowery and the Lower East Side.

The guy behind the desk snarled, “Money up front, no visitors in the rooms and…” The motherfooker gave her the look, sneered, added, “No clients in the rooms unless you want to pay extra.”

She was mortified, like the scumbag was calling her a hooker.

She roared, “You’ll get yours, you bastard.”

He would, but not in any way Angela could possibly have foreseen.

Angela’s room was shite, simple as that. When she turned on the light, the roaches scattered, as if they didn’t want to be there either. Cum stains on the bedspread-God only knew what the sheets looked like-crusted snot on the pillow cases, dirty towels thrown on the floor, and a turd floating in the toilet. Jaysus, good thing she wasn’t planning to spend very long-maybe, if her prayers were answered, not even a single night. Dressed to kill, in fuck-me heels, the micro skirt and the sheer black hose, she set out to score.

She went to Davy Byrnes on Duke Street. Her Lonely Planet guide-and fuck they got that right, she was as lonely as a banshee without a wail-said it was the watering hole for the yuppies, the moneyed young whizzers. Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” had unspooled in her head when she read that.

Well, the place had men all right-older men. Okay, she could do old, long as they had the moolah.

Guy in his fifties hit on her right away, said he was an accountant. His name was Michael. He was bald. He was barely five feet tall. But, most importantly, he owned lots of stock and property-including a place in the South of France-and, the clincher, he drove a Merc. Want to find a good man, find out what kind of car they drive. Michael gave her some shite about James Joyce drinking at Davy Byrnes. She thought, God, is that his line? She thought she’d heard them all, but a guy trying to win her over with Joyce was a brand new experience. Over the next year, she’d be hard pressed to enter a pub that Joyce hadn’t rested his elbow on. She’d sometimes wonder, when did he get the time to write all them impossible-to-read books? If he was drinking that much, no wonder the writing was so incomprehensible. And another thing, everyone in Ireland bored the ass offa her about him but no one had seemed to have actually read him. They’d seen the Angelica Huston movie and that was the whole of their Joyce expertise. Go figure.

She moved in with Michael pronto at his flat in Foxrock. No zip codes in Ireland, probably because the wild bastards couldn’t count. They uttered some neighborhoods in hushed tones, with the appendage Dublin 4, and that was enough.

Foxrock was most definitely Dublin 4 and Michael was lovely, as the Irish say, for a while. He took her out for nice posh meals, bought her silk lingerie from Ann Summers, Dublin’s version of Victoria’s Secret. Course, being a man, he bought stuff he liked that no woman would ever wear. She brought it all back, got the cash, building towards a nest egg. Good thing. Like so many times before, with so many other guys, he turned. Once they’d screwed you, once you were, as Irish men so delicately put it, well shagged, they lost interest. Michael’s personality turned too. Where was the accountant who’d seemed like an Irish version of Jason Alexander? All the weak bollix had ever hit was the books and now, now he was walloping her! The silver-tongued devil.

One night, after watching What’s Love Got To Do With It? and listening to Nancy Sinatra, Angela felt empowered and took off. Went right to an ATM and withdrew as much of Michael’s cash as she could. Angela’s rule: before you let a guy ride you, you get his account details. In his case, it was easy. The code for his ATM was JOYCE. She couldn’t make this shit up.

It was back to the River Inn and the sneer of the gobshite at the desk. So began a year of hell, the search for Mr. Right. There were ups and downs-mostly downs. Men supported her for a while, seemed to truly like her, but there was always a flip side. Married men told her they were single just to get laid, underage guys told her they were eighteen. One night, she was date-raped by a lawyer. Angela managed to get to the bathroom, grab a can of Lysol, and spray it into the cunt’s eyes, but she was starting to see a disturbing pattern here. She was a magnet for trouble. She was seriously thinking about packing it in, going to play for the other team. She wasn’t attracted to women, but she wasn’t attracted to a lot of the guys she was sleeping with either. Besides, it seemed like every guy she got involved with wound up hurting her. And it wasn’t just emotional pain. No, these men were leaving visible scars.

Self-help books were no help. Richard and Judy-fuck ’em. Even a talk with a shrink didn’t do crap. She didn’t go into formal therapy, but one night she started talking to a woman who was staying in the room next door to her. The woman mentioned she was a counselor and Angela invited her to a pub for a drink. When Angela started to describe some of her experiences with men, the woman started checking her watch, suddenly announced she had “an appointment.” Angela never saw the woman again.

Soon afterward, she hit rock bottom. It was her thirtieth birthday. Her clock was ticking. She didn’t have many eggs and she knew she’d be a great mother, she knew she had so much to give. It was back in the fishnet hose, back to pumps, back to the same old same old.

After a night of fending off the usual losers, she headed back to the hotel. She was wondering if it was all worth it and was considering a life of celibacy. Was it too late to become a nun?

Then she saw him, watching her from across the street. It was Bono. Well, close enough anyway. He had the rock star gig going on full force, with the hair, the sunglasses. Not Bono-style glasses-they looked like knockoff Ray-Bans-but, hey.

She was tired of waiting for guys to come up to her, being so fucking passive. Didn’t the psychology books say she had to assert herself? So when she saw him staring at her, she thought, Who the fook cares anymore, and went up to him, and said, “Hi, I’m Angela, want to buy me a drink?”

The line worked like magic. Better yet, she could tell he had a good soul, that she’d found the real thing. Had it always been this easy?

He offered to skip the drink part and go right back to his place. Angela wasn’t opposed. With a ticking clock, you had to move fast. Hell, if he asked her to marry her in the morning she’d say yes. As long as he was decent in bed, was willing to support her and her children, what did she have to lose?

There were a few things early on that caught her attention. He drove a Toyota. No Merc but, hey, it wasn’t a mini either. She noticed a strange odor in the car, like he’d washed it with ammonia. On the dashboard was a St. Bridget’s Cross, and when she asked him where the name Slide came from, he said, “From the Old Irish.” She wasn’t sure what this meant, but she figured, he was a religious guy-good sign. Then again, the micks, they’d kill you for a five spot and confess in the morning.

They went to a small house-more like a cabin-on the outskirts of the city, some place named Swords.

When they entered, Angela went, “Ted Kaczynski live here?” but for some reason the joke fell flat. Okay, so maybe he didn’t have a sense of humor and he wasn’t much of a talker either, but he was still cute as hell. She was dying to be kissed or-who was she kidding? — humped. If this didn’t lead to a relationship, at least she’d get a good lay. She hadn’t gotten any in over a month and when Angela Petrakos wasn’t getting any, look out world.

His place was, if not dirty, in need of a woman’s touch, that was for sure. There were beer cans on the couch, garbage on the coffee table. Then she saw rope and chains, which got her hopes up-maybe he was into kinky sex? But when she asked him about it, he muttered, “Haulage business,” and changed the subject, going, “Sorry me flat is such a wreck.”

She didn’t want to tell him that she was way into the whole chain thing. At this early stage, she didn’t want to make him think she was that kind of girl or anything. Much later, she’d learn all about restraints, the kidnapping, but not yet.

There was more painful silence as she watched him go around, cleaning the place.

Then she asked, “Do you read Joyce?” figuring she’d get that nonsense out of the way fast.

He gave her the look, the same one he gave her when they met on the street. His eyes had, what? A shine? A light? No, more like a fevered intensity. She liked them…a lot.

He said, “I’ve done Joyce, but I prefer non-fiction, mi amor. You familiar with The Road Less Traveled?”

What was with the Italian and was he trying to talk with a New York accent? He must’ve been trying to impress her, because she’d lived in New York. He was so cute, the pet.

Liking him more and more-which usually meant there was trouble ahead and lots of it-she asked, “You haven’t ever been an accountant, have you?”

After a rich, warm-the-cockles-of-yer-heart laugh, he said, “Baby, the one accounting I do is off the books.”

She laughed her own self. Christ on a bike, how long since she’d done that? A year? Not since New York, and even then there wasn’t exactly a lot to laugh about.

He got a turf fire going, gave the room a nice glow, and then they began to fool around a bit. Nothing heavy, the guy wasn’t all over her. He was tender almost. Then he made some hot toddies, even added cloves, saying, “Cloves, cos, I’m like the devil, baby.”

Things heated up. They got naked and he said, “Turn around for me.” Like an order, but she was into it. Then he took her fiercely and abruptly and she came with a scream.

Lying alongside her afterward, not even breathing heavy, he asked, “You know I was planning to kidnap you, right?”

Angela, playing along, still nearly breathless, gasped, “Kidnap me anytime you want, baby.”