In an earlier life Phil Blodgett was just Blodgett, because it suited him better. It was a time when he felt preyed upon by men in black suits, and when he was wild about cherrystone clams, the raw, pink wet ones.
Blodgett couldn’t resist those clams. He was a pig for them. On any given night he’d go by the kitchen raw bar ninety, a hundred times. At least three of those times he’d grab a juicy, just-opened cherrystone and suck it down before Gus the Shucker even noticed. Waiters were no more allowed to eat clams, oysters or shrimp from the kitchen than they were allowed to help themselves to Stoli or Wild Turkey from the bar.
Blodgett acquired his own black suit, his waiter’s tux, at Keezer’s used clothing store in Cambridge. The head waiter, Bobby, gave him no choice in the matter of career apparel. “Fredo’s is a class place,” he said. “We all wear tuxes. You put your little ass in a tux if you want to work at Fredo’s.”
Blodgett considered himself an actor at the time, which meant he took a class or two at B.U. or Emerson extension, paid to have head shots taken and showed up now and then at auditions for local commercials and industrials. He had a couple of screen credits but had yet to be cast as a principal player; he was still waiting, and longing, for the camera to look on his handsome face for at least a full second - while he spoke a real line.
He told his acting friend Erica - the one who made him pose for her, oiled all over and stroking his penis - that he looked forward to wearing a tux each night because it made him think of English plays and films with butlers in them. “I’ll be the butler of Fredo’s,” he said. “What do you think of that?”
Erica frowned with those pouty, princess lips of hers. “Phil the butler. It doesn’t sound right.”
“Then I’ll be Blodgett,” he said. “Blodgett the butler.”
So it began. Just Blodgett. And he joined the black suit brigade. French-serving the vegetables. Boning a whole sole calabrese. Swiveling around the tables like a matador with his little towel. He had the waiter’s gene. Working when the rest of the world was partying. Groveling suavely for tips on nights like New Year’s Eve, those American ceremonial nights when all wait-people are left out and very alone. De-shelling the lobster for New Year’s couples and lovers. Fussing foppishly over the bananas flambé while the girl gropes the boy under the table. “I wait,” said Blodgett, assuming a Shakespearian pose in front of Aldo, the half-wit dishwasher. “I wait, therefore I am.”
“Fuck you,” said Aldo, plunging both bony arms into the gray, greasy water.
Every time Blodgett put on his well-worn tux he could smell the armpits of the last three men who had owned it, and no amount of dry cleaning could erase the stink. It was the penalty for buying Keezer’s absolutely cheapest, most-used model. But Bobby had told him not to go overboard. “You’re only going to get it stained with lasagna anyway, honey,” he had advised, and sashayed away with his armful of menus.
After just one month on the waitstaff Blodgett left his roach-ridden Chelsea rooming house. He was a convert to Little Italy and the waiter’s life. He moved to the North End and to the domain of a new landlord, some Baciagalupi who lived off the rents squeezed from three tomato-stained tenements. Blodgett’s place was right across from an Italian butcher shop, where the window was crammed with skinned lambs and rabbits strung up for Easter. It made sense to be there, just around the corner from Fredo’s and a stone’s throw from the other Italian restaurants too, just in case things didn’t work out. The apartment Blodgett found was a pre-urban renewal classic; so small the toilet, sink and stove were all in the same room. He could piss and fry an egg at the same time.
The waiters were fed at five sharp, giving them ample time to finish and set up for the dinner rush. Lino, or one of the other fat-armed cooks, would do up a trough of baked ziti, always overcooking it because he had better things to think about. The waiters would line up with plates and the cook would shovel and dump, distributing the burned ziti more in the manner of a zookeeper than a chef.
Carrying his ziti plate, Blodgett would always do a sly detour by the raw bar, but there were times Gus would catch him in the act.
“You like a fucking seagull, stealing clams from the boat.”
“What’s a clam to you, Gus? One lousy clam.”
“If I had a cleaver I chop your fucking hand.”
But Gus would always relent. “Take your fucking clam. Fucking seagull.”
Among the black-suits was one genuine black-shirt, an old Neapolitan they called Dutchy, after the Italian Duce, because he was a major fan of Mussolini and his causes. This meant Dutchy after all these years was still fighting the Ethiopians, whom he saw as all the African people walking the face of the earth, including every last black living in Boston. “Mussolini, he clean ‘em up,” Dutchy said to Blodgett. “He come here, make ‘em all into soap.”
“Mussolini’s dead, Dutchy.”
“You think he’s dead? Not dead around here.”
That very night, Bobby steered a party of Harvard professors to Dutchy’s station. The academics all loved Dutchy for his age and his humbled English; he was their peasant Methuselah, straight out of Fellini. It made them feel they were more in the grottoes of Italy than a plastic booth nine hundred feet from Boston Garden, and they always went with his recommendations, dishes he claimed weren’t on the menu.
Blodgett heard Dutchy say to the eldest prof, “hey, tonight you get Steak Africane. Lino make it for you special.”
The whole party ordered it – tenderloin in a black butter sauce, deep and dark.
“See, I serve them niggermeat, a la Africane,” Dutchy said to Blodgett, stacking his tray and pushing through the kitchen doors. “Make Mussolini proud.”
In front of the professors he did a little bow, sized up the generous tip possibilities, and ordered Blodgett to run back for sides of linguine vongole, on the house.
“Make it al dente,” he hissed. “Not the fucking steamed shit in the steamtable.”
Blodgett did as he was told and even helped Dutchy clear the plates, dumping the uneaten Steak Africane in a doggie bag. At two in the morning he closed up and left the North End for the South End and the Fenway. He followed a small rat into a Symphony Road apartment house and shared the contents of the doggie bag with Ollie, his new friend from the Beth Israel Hospital film. The B.I. was doing a twenty-minute industrial for staff training. A down and dirty production; no union amenities, not even a box of free doughnuts for the cast. Blodgett and Ollie were playing orderlies, chosen at callbacks under the usual Oreo strategy: one white youth and one black, both equally handsome, both equally stuck in jobs spilling piss and shit out of bedpans.
“You’re eating niggermeat, you know,” Blodgett said, swigging a fat hit of jug wine. “That’s what he calls it. I mean it.”
“Tastes good,” Ollie said, his mouth full of the tenderloin. “Tastes like me. Can I visit you at your job some day?”
“You can go anywhere you want. They’re not all racists like Dutchy, you know.”
“Yes they are,” said Ollie. He grabbed the jug and thrust the neck in his mouth, like a gas pump into a tank. “But I want to see the motherfuckers for myself.”
They wound up back in the North End, both sleeping in Blodgett’s dwarf apartment. At noon the next day they trudged across to the Café della Sport - to pry open their eyelids with double espressos. And if all the other customers’eyeballs had been bullets, they’d have been shot dead a thousand times.
“It’s 1986,” said Ollie. “But in Little Italy it’s 1886.”
Blodgett couldn’t believe it. “You can stay with me all you want,” he said. “You got a rat in your place.”
“It’s not a rat. It’s a large mouse. And if I stay with you I might wind up cooked in a Calzone.”
“Calzone a la Africane.”
After espressos and biscotti they made their way to the hellish Auto Mile in Norwood, where Blodgett handed some huckster on a windswept lot all the tips and wages he had to his name. In return he and Ollie chugged back to town in the lemon of lemons, a kicked-around, rusting MG roadster.
“I wanted an actor’s car,” Blodgett said. “It’s the best I could do.”
“You’re not an actor,” Ollie said. “You’re a waiter.”
Blodgett had one good reason, one only, to justify the midget car. It was like his apartment. Sized to fit cramped Little Italy, the fruit-strewn alleys and backstreets that were skinny as capellini.
As it turned out, the initials MG were significant. A portent. He spied them that very night, embossed on a cigarette case of phony gold. Mando, the head of the back room, stole into the storeroom where Blodgett was sneaking a break among the onion sacks, trying to cop a few minutes of peace away from Dutchy, his dictator. Mando slid out the gold-toned case with his spindly, tobacco-yellow fingers and lit up.
“Clam boy,” Mando said, and muttered something rank about pink, juicy cherrystone clams and the female sex organ. With a shrug, Blodgett suggested the raw, open clam could also be compared to the male baboon’s ass.
Then he asked, “You slow tonight too, Mando?”
“Slow, fuck yes. I can’t live on this shit.”
Blodgett asked him what the G on the cigarette case stood for.
“My last name. Fuck, what you think?”
Mando was the waiter who ran the back room the same way Dutchy ran the front room. They were the two field generals, and the other waiters were the troops. As for Bobby, he talked a big game up front, the day Blodgett was hired, but in reality he was head waiter in name only. He bossed no one, because he dished and swished too much for Nicky, the big boss, to take him seriously. Bobby was more like the male hostess than the head of anyone, lisping and hugging the menus to his chest as he wiggled down the aisle, leading the parties to their tables.
“Hey, clam boy,” Mando said to Blodgett, “you suck one tonight yet?”
“Had three tonight. Gus was in the walk-in freezer digging out shrimp. I could have had six.”
Although Mando looked like a pimp he was actually a family man, a career waiter with four kids. He worked every split shift, sometimes seven days a week, and every holiday. Mando was a pro; he could carry six zabaglione up his long arm. So Blodgett was flattered when Mando asked him to leave Dutchy and come work the back room with him.
“I got the okay from Nicky,” he said, “don’t you worry. Tonight I fire two guys, they suck cock anyway. Then it be just you and me. We work the room, maybe we can make a buck.”
Mando wasted no time showing him how to pork up the tips. There were the legal ways, such as passing out thin chocolate mints at the end, making sure you placed an individual mint in front of each diner. Always good for a few extra bucks. There were times when eye contact worked, or kneeling, or simply touching a shoulder. There was knowing which people to keep out of your station, if possible: two old ladies splitting a check, for sure; and all parties of sailors, and any and all people from Maine.
As for those who tipped the best … without question guys who were dating each other were very good. And guys who were dating each other who were priests were so good they could duke you a hundred percent - and more than that if there was something about you.
Mando waited till the dead part of the evening to instruct Blodgett in the less than legal way to pork up a tip. He took him outside and showed him Rico, the man in the cap who parked cars. Rico was a cross between a jockey and an ape; tiny-assed with wide shoulders and hands like gorilla paws.
“Ever hear of Willy Pep?” asked Mando. “He could have been the next Willy Pep. Fast as a plane, punch like a train. Instead he parks cars for Nicky. And other things.”
Mando let the comment sink in. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, lit another and went on, explaining that all over Boston the restaurants were switching to computerized registers. Machines that automatically priced the items and spit out the checks. But the North End guys like Nicky were so goddam cheap they still had their waiters scribbling out the bills by hand. Every man, even the ancient Dutchy, carried a pencil and a bill-pad in the breast pocket of his tux.
Fredo’s also didn’t take plastic, none of it. Nicky always said he would rather break sidewalks with sledgehammers than hand over four percent to American Express.
Mando fixed his pimp eyes on Blodgett and spoke gravely. “When the fucking computers come in I go looking for a new job. Open a grocery store or something. Get my own computer.”
But until that day, Mando continued, he would go on applying both ends of his pencil. Using the lead point to tack on an extra ten percent or so to the bill. Then using the eraser to remove the ten percent once the customer had handed over the cash.
Blodgett found he had no moral objections whatsoever to being double-tipped. He kept his eraser clean, pocketed the bonus cash, and made sure his addition was exactly right when he finally handed in the checks to the cashier. Even on shit nights he came out with a decent wad in his pocket. Two tips for every one.
Three weeks into the scam Blodgett asked Mando what would happen if Nicky found out what they were up to.
“Then you see Rico,” he said, “and Rico see you.” Blodgett could feel the bolt go up Mando’s spine and leap into his own. He had the sensation they had both been hanging out for the subway and suddenly they’d been shoved, from behind, onto the third rail.
From that moment on, Blodgett was seized with a touch of that third-rail feeling again and again. It hit him every time he stood before Ralphie the cashier, who was a kissass first cousin of Nicky, waiting to turn in a fucked-over check.
“Hey, clam boy, you got to take a chance to make a chance,” Mando said, attempting to settle Blodgett down.
On St. Anthony’s Feast Day, Fredo’s was a zoo. Outside, the trumpets blew somberly and the holy procession marched through the angel-hair streets, one street skinnier than the next, holding the saint high in the air above the sweating crowd. The tenements emptied as crones in shawls and men in Bicycle Thief undershirts clawed into the sea of people, begging for room to pin their dollar bills over every exposed inch of the sacred figure.
The image of the saint covered with money was still in Blodgett’s head, shortly after the huge dinner rush died down, when two tall priests came in and were seated deep in the back room, in the darkest table. Even in the shadows Blodgett could tell they were flush-faced Irishmen. They wore civilian jackets over their black shirts and white collars; they smoked Gauloises and French-inhaled languidly, and they sent Blodgett to the bar for two Negrones, the pungent, ruby-hued martinis of Italy.
“Make them with Tanqueray and Cinzano, real Cinzano,” said one of the priests as Blodgett pivoted and headed off. He felt the fatherly eyeballs lasered on his back. Feeling so coveted brought out the actor in him, and he gave his hips a little bounce, a la Bobby, even though it made him feel sluttish.
Suddenly Mando swept alongside, whispering stage directions. “Those two spend,” he said. “Do the antipasto yourself, in front of them.”
“I think I am the antipasto,” said Blodgett.
It was Blodgett’s luck, not good luck, that Nicky himself was tending bar tonight. Nicky was so much the owner, his every action seemed motivated by divine right. The way he patrolled the long stretch of mahogany made it all look smaller, more a podium for an iron-fisted tyrant than a long counter staffed by a human in an apron.
“Two Negrones,” Blodgett said. “Straight up. With Tanqueray and Cinzano.”
Nicky nodded, but ignored the bottles of Tanqueray and Cinzano displayed on the mirrored shelf behind him. Instead, he reached under the bar and came up with two no-names, Mount Vernon Gin and Rossini red vermouth. Blodgett knew Nicky was boosting the margins by slipping in rotgut, but the murderous way Nicky squeezed the necks of the bottles as he worked told him something. Told him to keep his mouth shut.
Following protocol, Blodgett took a small round cocktail tray off the stack. He held it, in respectful obedience, as Nicky loaded on the pair of Negrones, but he became embarrassed when a sudden case of the shakes seized his tray-hand. The liquid, which should have been still as the glass itself, shivered visibly. Blodgett turned away to hide the panic - too quickly, and Nicky caught him.
“Hey, kid, no cocktail napkins? Where’s your manners?”
Blodgett grabbed two napkins and fled back to Mando and the priests.
By the time he reached tableside he was calm and suave again, so much so that one of the priests, the most fatherly of the two, stopped in mid-sentence and followed Blodgett’s every move in serving the drinks, the way a camera shooting slow-motion follows the twists and turns of an athlete or a muscular horse.
“You have a classic North Italian face,” the priest said. “Classic. Does that make you blush?”
Blodgett said nothing and smiled modestly. To his knowledge he hadn’t a touch of Italian in his veins, North or otherwise, and if he had a church at all it was Congregationalist.
He set down the cocktail napkins and backed off a good ten feet. The Irish priests said “Salut” to each other and lifted the Negrones to their lips. Suddenly the one who had oozed over Blodgett’s facial features turned dark as a demon.
“Waiter,” he snapped, “what’s in these drinks?”
Blodgett rushed back, putting on the best poker face he could. He mumbled and fumbled with his order pad.
“This isn’t Cinzano,” the priest declared. “It’s not Tanqueray either.”
Without a word of protest Blodgett swept up the drinks and trotted back to Nicky’s bar.
“These are priests,” he said, holding out the tray. “They say it’s not Cinzano and it’s not Tanqueray.”
Nicky was dead-silent for a moment, still as stone. Then a smile crept on his face and he spread his palms over the two drinks, as though he were a priest himself, the bar was his altar, and he was blessing a pair of sacramental goblets.
“Now it’s Cinzano,” he intoned. “Now it’s Tanqueray.”
And with a wave of his hand he sent Blodgett off to complete his mission.
The mood, back at the priestly table, was no better than when he had left. Blodgett put down the drinks gingerly, the way one would serve raw meat to snarling wolves. And he put down new cocktail napkins as well.
The fatherly priest sipped first and closed his eyes, de-constructing his long, slow swallow.
Finally he looked up and spoke.
“Grazia,” he said. “This is what we ordered.”
And Blodgett bowed.
“Let me bring you bread and olio,” he said. “And I’ll toast it for you too.”
The priests dined and drank like cardinals, running up the largest tab Blodgett had ever seen from a deuce, a party of two. In the lulls between courses and wine changes they called Blodgett over, just to look at him, contraposto, as though he were a marble statue in a ducal garden, and not just an acting student in a tux that smelled like it once belonged to an old man with a goat.
“Jim would like to photograph you,” said the less boisterous priest, speaking of his companion, the fatherly one who had sent back the Negrones. “Would you like that? Jim has a big Hasselblad.”
Blodgett had noticed that the less he spoke the more he intrigued them. So he said nothing, nothing at all, and went away to add up the bill. He tried to walk the way the statue of David might walk if it came to life.
“These are your padres,” he said to Mando. “Do you still want to add the spiff?”
You’d be stealing from your church.”
Mando reminded Blodgett of the saint being paraded in the streets, money pinned on him everywhere.
“Tonight I be his partner,” Mando said. “So what’s wrong with that?”
Thanks to the priests, when Nicky finally locked the doors Blodgett had so many bills in his pocket he couldn’t stand it. He shot home, raced up the four wooden flights to the dwarf apartment and turned the key, eager to grab Ollie and slam down to the after-hours joints deep in the old Roxbury, the dusky, jive-dive Ollie places. There he would slug Jack and Coke, suck up some more cherrystones, oysters too, and duke a few other waiters as royally as the priests had duked him.
In no time flat his plans went down the shitter, big time. There sat Ollie, cowering on the can in the kitchen, his eyebrow torn open, balling up his socks and throwing toothbrush, razor et al.into his gym bag.
“Who kicked your ass?” Blodgett demanded.
“Nobody in particular. A hundred flying beer bottles.”
“Let me fix you.” Blodgett reached for the torn eyebrow, the gash in the butterscotch skin, but Ollie pushed him away. At this phase of Blodgett’s life it was the skin that got him going more than anything else, the sheen and polish of it. It wasn’t a gender thing – at least he told himself it wasn’t. It would have been no different if Ollie were a girl named Mollie, as long as she had the tone, the buff. Skin to skin; mirror to mirror, I am you and you are me – it was easy, so easy why even think about it?
“I’ve been waiting for you all night,” Ollie said. “I want you to drive me out of here. I’ll never sleep in this hellhouse again.”
He trembled as he spoke, sweated and shook blood on the floor, and when he explained how they had come at him Blodgett couldn’t deny Ollie had every right in the world to shake, to shit, to run like the wind itself.
They had been crouching behind crates and garbage cans and cars on the narrow side street, all hopped up with fervor from the Feast Day, the berserk posse of Little Italy kids who had seen Blodgett and Ollie come and go, come and go, night after night. The moment Ollie popped out on the stoop they let the bottles fly like burning arrows, doing the whole nigger go home thing, the vigilante rant from another century. Nothing you would ever see in Cambridge, in Brookline, not even in fucking Charlestown, not in this day and age. Only here, in the North End; and only there, in the other end, South Boston, probable home of the Negrone-loving priests.
While Ollie stuffed his gym bag and steeled his nerves, Blodgett went back down and brought the MG right alongside the stoop, like a police boat at a dock. The shitbox sounded its standard death rattle, but it moved. Blodgett scanned the streets like a getaway man, beeped the horn and Ollie sprinted down. He jumped in and Blodgett floored the pedal, nearly crushing a mangy cat. As the North End receded from view, Ollie went from panic to funk. He flat-out refused to party. Blodgett left him on a street corner, skulked back to his empty bed and slept horribly, nothing in his stained black pants but cash.
He awoke to a sky that filled his postage stamp of a window with the color of pent-up pus. The bulges of yellowish gray threatened a furious downpour. But the storm hadn’t broken yet; it was all in a state of suspension and foreboding; and not a drop had been shed on the filthy panes.
This was his day off, and “off” was the operative word. He wanted to dump his tux in the drycleaner, and scoot away in his roadster to points unknown. He pictured a part of the Cape, beyond the storm clouds, that corresponded to his images of the Riviera. Endless asses bronzing in an infinite tanning booth.
He swigged and spat mouthwash, threw something on, grabbed the musty tux and the car keys and hit the stairs, bounding as though he were breaking jail.
In the street Blodgett’s shoes turned to stone; and he could no more move than a fly whose legs were stuck to flypaper.
But it was his eyes that were freezing him in place, not his feet.
He was staring straight at the MG. It was there, right where he left it. Same car, same color: rust-pocked racing green. But its position had changed; it was on its back, like an insect that had been flipped over by a shoe or a shock of wind.
The first wave of nausea slammed Blodgett then and there. He felt nausea as though it were a human hand, long fingers in a sleek black glove, reaching right through the skin of his abdomen and grabbing the organs, clamping them so tight the blood stopped and the nerves howled.
He almost doubled over, but the imagined hand loosened and withdrew as swiftly as it had come. Blodgett walked to his car, walked all around it and finally knelt beside it, at the point where he could best read the letters scrawled on the windshield.
Niggerlover, the letters said, although the scrawler had messed up the spelling, leaving out one of the g’s. For a fleeting moment Blodgett’s optimism gene kicked in, telling him he was only being accused of loving some place called Niger, a river in Africa, or an old name for Nigeria. The next moment he was back realizing that Niger, in this neighborhood, could only mean Nigger, and that Nigger could only mean Ollie.
A jab of something purely animal told Blodgett to make tracks at once, to run with all his might; but a counter-jab of something very human told him no way, not without my car. So he scurried for the cover of his building and his apartment, where he hoped he could phone a tow truck.
Just before turning heel he ran his finger over the white scrawl, wondering if it was paint or just chalk. The waxy feel and the smell showed him it was neither. It was soap.
Mussolini, he clean ‘em up. He come here, turn ‘em all into soap.
As Blodgett hightailed it up the steps, he kept whipping his head around, looking for the ghost-gang he knew was after him, the hundred teenage Mussolinis of whom Dutchy would be proud.
Back upstairs he slammed the dead-bolt, and the very phrase scared him, signifying he might be bolted in dead. Then he began calling around, telephoning garages in neutral neighborhoods. Finally, someone sent four apes who picked up the puny MG as easily as a side of beef and dumped it upright. The vehicle bounced on its tires and shook off a side mirror and a shard of rear bumper, brown as a rotted tooth. But every other appendage, including the windshield wipers, seemed to stay attached. Blodgett watched the operation from his high narrow window, and as soon as the tires hit the ground he was down the stairs like a gazelle pursued by cheetahs. He took a wet rag to rub out the soap-scrawl and his pantload of cash to placate the apes; and to get them to stay right where they were, guarding his escape, at least until he was around the corner and in high gear.
Twenty minutes beyond the North End, where the Southeast Expressway opened up, a welcome wave leaned into Blodgett, and he in turn leaned into the accelerator. It was the sheer force of the moment itself, the moment in which he saw the facts for what they really were. He was out of harm’s way, he could still be a waiter and a young actor anywhere on this earth, he was heading south and the bloated yellow-grey clouds were heading north. Blodgett could even see streamers of blue at the horizon, and the streamers to him meant the festive fuck-all party that was Provincetown. The scent of it was already in his nostrils, that beach in the dunes of Truro; the sunbathers topless, bottomless, limitless.
Blodgett had forgotten the black-gloved hand; but it hadn’t forgotten him. It let him get as far as Hyannis, just about half way down the peninsula. There the clenching fingers reached right through Blodgett’s wall of skin and stomach muscle, found the raw, coiling intestine and began to squeeze. Here, there and everywhere, sometimes lightly and other times so hard it wrung perspiration out of every pore on Blodgett’s body, and strength from his muscles. He pulled into a Mobil station and parked on the side, where the rest rooms had handwritten signs that said customers only. Inside the station he purchased a candy bar just to get his hands on the key to the toilet, one of those keys they affix to a crude chunk of wood so big you can’t pocket it. Walking around to the rest room door he had the sense Hyannis was in a different galaxy, one with a system of gravity that made putting one foot after the next a stunningly exhausting exercise. He also had an urge to get the candy bar out of his sight – just drop it on the ground, anything – because even the feel of the wrapper in his hand was nauseating.
Inside the cool, solitary cell of the men’s room he discovered just how topsy turvy this new world was. Blodgett took a shit and it was white, white as limestone. He pissed and it was brown as cola.
The men’s room mirror showed him the new Blodgett. A person with skin befitting a wax museum, steeped in a yellowness he associated with infection, the yellow that oozes out of a dirty wound. The taint was deepest in the corners of his eyes.
For the first time in his life Blodgett felt so bad he wanted to go to the doctor, and he was fearing bad things. The A-word. He bought a little gas from the Mobil attendant for no other purpose than to insure he got accurate directions to the Hyannis Hospital. The oily-faced attendant, as he stuffed the fat nozzle into the rickety MG, made a point of rolling his eyes and generally acting insulted, as though he were being called upon by some diseased dandy to jam good U.S. gas into a thing that wasn’t even a car, a contraption no better than a shitpiece roller skate.
But the roller skate rattled away and found the hospital.
To Blodgett, the doctor they gave him might just as well have been an undertaker in a white coat.
“You’re a sick man,” he said, but the pitiless look on his face - a melodrama face with a villain’s mustache - seemed to say, “you’re a sickening man.”
Shivering in the johnny they had made him wear, Blodgett heard the doctor’s voice swerve in mid-sentence and turn as metallic as the steel examining table, which made him shiver all the more. He paced back and forth in his medical white coat and began to speak gravely of the blood tests. They had been positive. Blodgett slumped, doubled up by a new wave of cramping.
But the morbid doctor never proclaimed that Blodgett had the A-word. It wasn’t on his clipboard that day.
The disease he had come to discuss was from another part of the medical dictionary.
The H-word.
“Hepatitis is serious,” said the doctor, in his chilliest undertaker voice. “If you don’t take care of it, it can take your life.”
Given the diagnosis Blodgett had expected, this grim pronouncement seemed like a reprieve from the gallows, a mere slap on the wrist. The H-word may have been Hepatitis, but for him it was Hallelujah.
Yellow skin, white shit, brown piss. Now Blodgett wanted answers. Who did all this to him?
Not Ollie, it turned out. Not Erica. Not Jim the priest. Not the Navy captain or the Navy captain’s wife. Not the stylist who smeared her powder over the hot spot on his forehead for his bedpan-emptying part in the B.I. movie. Not the three-chinned state rep who stalked him, begging to suck him off, in a long black official car all the way from the Golden Dome down the slope of Beacon Hill to the Haymarket pushcarts.
It was Gus the Shucker who did it.
“Tell me your favorite food,” asked the doctor.
This was the last thing Blodgett wanted to discuss. His appetite was obliterated. The very thought of food made him want to hurl.
“Tell me.”
Blodgett told him but the doctor already knew. Bootleg clams from contaminated beds. Sewer food. They’d been dropping people like flies all month. Greater Boston was a hepatitis hot zone.
All those smart, suave moves. Hovering at the edge of the raw bar like a seagull, waiting for Gus to duck into the refrigerator for a new bushel of oysters. Then swooping in on the cherrystones.
Perhaps it was Gus himself. His fingers. Maybe Gus never used toilet paper.
“I’m admitting you for a few days,” the doctor said. “We need to check your bilirubin.”
Blodgett thought he was talking about a Jewish kid. He had never been with any Billy Rubin, far as he could remember. But after two days in an isolated room – they installed him in a special wing for communicable diseases – he began to get a handle on hospital talk, on the neat little shorthand hospital people have for the most calamitous events. Room 356 stroked out. Kill that monitor, will you?
Not drinking alcohol for a solid year – the doctor’s orders – didn’t seem hard to bear, not at the time, because the very thought of a Jack and Coke sliding down his throat brought the bile sliding up. As for work, the doctor said nothing about that, but Blodgett felt no more capable of carrying a food-laden waiter’s tray than lifting the iron-framed bed they had him in.
For all he knew they had already canned him. Unlike cooks, waiters were seen as being a dime a dozen; and he had been AWOL two days. With his yellow left hand Blodgett picked up the phone on his bed table. With his yellow right index finger he dialed Fredo’s. He wasn’t sure who picked up, so he asked for Mando.
There was a long silence, followed by rustling and muffled voices. Then Bobby came on and asked him where he was.
“I’m in the hospital,” Blodgett said. “Sick as puke.”
“Isn’t that interesting. That’s where Mando is too. The one next to Campagno’s funeral parlor.”
“You’re kidding? I never saw Mando eat any clams.”
Bobby laughed a bitter laugh. “Clams? Mando didn’t eat clams. He ate knuckles, honey. Served by Rico.”
Just the way Bobby said that gave Blodgett the whole picture. Ralphie the kissass cashier, starting to punch in a check, spotting something that makes him tilt his bifocals, wrinkle his nose and squint. Split-second later he’s zooming in like a high-powered lens on a faint gray blotch, the telltale erasure mark. Next comes Rico, the axe-fisted little ape, the bantam who could have been Willie Pep, taking Mando apart on the asphalt of the parking lot.
And Nicky licking his chops. Pouring Rico a Strega.
“If Mando wakes up at all he’ll be lucky. Or unlucky. If he wakes up, he won’t be Mando.”
The words carried such a bolt of terror Blodgett almost dropped the phone, as though it had suddenly turned live and hot with deadly electricity. He thought of the subway and the third rail, of big hands pushing him off the platform.
“You don’t fuck with our checks. You don’t steal our money.” Bobby’s voice became thin, cool and sharp, a stiletto voice, stabbing at his ear.
“And if I were you, honey,” Bobby said, “I’d get my little ass to another planet.”
Which Blodgett tried to do. Tried to do in spite of the black-gloved fingers laying strangle-holds on his sensitive stomach parts. In spite of his bloated liver making his feet so heavy he could hardly drag them out of the hospital door. Drag them he did, but this time he found the scabbed-up MG was as comatose as Mando. Dead-silent, not even a whirr or a whine. And Blodgett crept back to bed to hide behind the whitecoats and consider his options.
Everything was extra work, even the telephone. It had the leaden heft of a small barbell.
Ollie was not an option. He clicked off in two seconds flat.
Erica, the pouty princess, was so amused at Blodgett’s description of himself, yellow inside and out, she said she’d drive down from Boston just to see it. She called him dahhling, doing the theater-school Tallulah thing, and said she’d bring him daffodils, a big yellow bunch.
If he felt like it, she said, her voice shrieking into his ear, they could do the scene from Menagerie, the one about Amanda and her jonquils.