Haggerty was a Catholic patriarch, the old school. So when he found out Francine, his art-photographer daughter, had been seen leaving Room 303 at the crack of dawn, his face got as purple as a bishop’s cloak and he pinched his praying, sniveling wife. Haggerty’s style was to pinch instead of punch. Little merciless pinches all over Dottie’s spare tire and thigh rolls and bat wings. He would hold a pinch for thirty seconds and twist it. But this the world never saw. Assumption College loved Haggerty’s ass for the student reflectory he built, in a style the school’s consulting architect dubbed “medieval industrial park.”
It so happened Francine had the functional tits that were Jitzy’s favorite kind. They were thin and pendulous - nothing like the ones in the magazines, except National Geographic - and maybe they weren’t for everyone. To each his own. But when Francine was in Room 303 straddling Jitzy and they were swinging down around his head they looked about two feet long, like the party balloons you can squeeze and bend into animal shapes.
Theirs was a match made in black and white with a matte finish. Francine was of the Diane Arbus school – a freak to you is all of humanity to me. In her field of vision Jitzy was a subject sent down from Hasselblad Heaven.
And Haggerty was all wrong about his daughter and Jitzy anyway. Francine wasn’t doing one-night stands in the Holiday Inn. It’s not a one night stand if a woman of forty four is visiting a man of forty two in his home.
Why, it was Haggerty himself who had started calling Jitzy “the man who lives in the Holiday Inn.” Just to taunt him like a like a helpless dog - because he thought it sounded funny - because it made Jitzy into one of the lame ducks of life, as Dottie once put it. Secretly Dottie liked to think of Jitzy as a charity case. Every time she sent a casserole over to Room 303 it made her feel higher in the food chain. It was her form of pinching.
And then the workers and fellow salesmen picked it up and they always said it too - in a snide way - look, the man who lives in the Holiday Inn - as if they all dwelled in really, truly better places. With their split levels and their sump pumps. Well, as Jitzy’s mother used to say, they could all go shit in their hats and pull it over their ears.
It just made sense - given where he was, given what he was doing. He was staying in Holiday Inns all over Hell’s Half Acre anyway; crisscrossing the land from one to another. He was getting used to the way they did things. He liked the security of not being able to pick up a table lamp because it was bolted down to the nightstand. If you couldn’t pick it up you couldn’t knock it over, and if you went bananas or something, or someone else went bananas on you, nobody could grab the table lamp and crash it against a wall or break a skull with it. When you’re starting to think about living on some piss-poor pension and social security and Haggerty’s handouts these things become important to you.
Better to make some deal with a nice Holiday Inn in your local area now and move in and be done with it. Jitzy could count, he could add and subtract. He could see the cruel path of inflation written on the wall - on the happy Holiday Inn wallpaper - and he wasn’t about to wait until it dropped him down the chute to Motel Six or Econo-Lodge or worse.
His furnishings needs were minimal. A closet pole and hangers, and a bed that was hardly king-sized. He had smoked since he was nine years old and maybe this had stunted his growth. He still bought his clothing items in the boys’ department. But being a shrimp had advantages non-shrimps can’t even imagine. It made Francine’s breasts seem even longer, like the drooping ears of a giant rabbit. When she loomed over him on all fours he pillow-talked her about tying them around his head.
Do your ears hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot,
Can you tie them in a bow?
Can you throw them over your shoulder
Like a Continental soldier,
Do your ears hang low?
For a shrimp, Jitzy could carry one whale of a bag, because he was born for it. In younger days , when he was a bellhop at the Ritz, the elevator broke down and he carried a bag that was bigger than he was up eleven floors. He carried it for an old man with a stained tweed suit who wanted him to stay and play for his tip. Jitzy did what he had to do and got out of there. Why is it the whole world thinks aging bachelors who move into the Ritz to live out their lives are privileged and elegant? But a man who lives in the Holiday Inn is daft and dangerous, a pervert who might prey on kids at the pool? When Jitzy finally quit being a Ritz bellhop you could drive a truck up his ass and there would be passing lanes on the sides. In the Holiday Inn you carry your own bags and stay out of trouble. It’s the American way.
If Holiday Inns are anything, they’re convenient. Jitzy’s was equi-distant from the Springfield and Hartford airports and a stone’s throw from the Dispoz-a-flame headquarters, warehouse and showroom. Room 303 was not too high and not too low. It gave its permanent occupant a sweeping view of the Oldfield strip mall and the dirty gray hills beyond.
It was the strip mall that was the bonus. The Holiday Inn was so contiguous it felt like a limb jointed to the K mart. On cold days Jitzy could walk from his room to the Kmart to the food court without spending more than six seconds outdoors. Francine would send him down for props – Halloween masks – while she set up the tripod.
Be that as it may, Jitzy still picked Haggerty’s cotton. He lugged the big Dispoz-a-flame and Dispoz-a-flash cases from Skowhegan to San Bernadino, humping to make quota and beyond. Only Haggerty himself was a better salesman, because he was so evil.
“Those Frenchies can make pens,” he’d say to customers, dissing the Dispos-a-flame’s rival lighter, the Bic. “But trust them with lighter fluid, never. Remember the War.”
Jitzy never changed a sheet and he never cleaned the toilet. He had new neighbors every night, on both sides and up and down. He always had fresh mini-packs of shampoo by the tub. He stubbed out his cigarettes in ashtrays he didn’t own, and the maid dumped the ashes and butts. He never unpacked his suitcase. He traveled four days out of every seven, carrying Dispoz-a-flame lighters and Dispoz-a-flash flashlights to smoke shops across the land. Wherever he went, they put him in Room 303, so he was home and away from home at the very same time. That was the marvel of the Holiday Inn. Let Dottie Haggerty prattle and cross herself about family dinners and tree houses and peewee hockey and her thirty grandchildren bobbing for apples in front of the hearth. Let Haggerty throw another log on the fire and pound his chest about owning the prettiest piece of God’s country east or west of the Yangtze, where Red slaves fabricated the Dispoz-a-flame gold-toned caps.
No one has a deed on God’s country, he told Francine.
“Twist your body,” she said, aiming the Leica. “Contraposto. Now put on the space helmet and think of landing on a distant star. Do not smile.”
All Jitzy had to do was pick up the phone for a wakeup call. Long as he lived he would not have to purchase toilet paper.
Haggerty wanted you to think he, King Haggerty, owned everything. He owned a race horse at Saratoga. He owned Francine until the church might join her hand in marriage - and he swore such a union would not be, not while he drew breath, to a cretin half her size.
One day Haggerty called Jitzy into his Normandy Tudor office and held an eight by ten glossy of the horse under Jitzy’s nose. “Can you find the nuts?” he asked.
“Not on him,” said Jitzy.
“Fair warning,” said Haggerty, flicking a custom true-gold Dispoz-a-flame under the tip of his Cohiba.
But Francine still spent that night in Room 303. And Jitzy dreamt of the starry desert, his tent a canopy of teats. But only for so long.
For this was a night to remember. The night of the Big Boom.
The ear-splitting force of it nearly broke the Richter Scale at the Assumption College lab. Next came the marshals, the ATF and the regular cops, who did enough interviews to make a case file taller than Jitzy. They dug into everything and everyone. And why not? The conflagration, after all, was the biggest ever in regional history. A pre-dawn blast that lit up the countryside, rocked the dirty gray hills and even made the Holiday Inn buckle.
During the dead of night the Dispoz-a-flame warehouse had burst like a nuclear bomb. A half million gold-toned lighters exploded sky-high. Barrels of fluid ignited and launched the roof like a NASA space station. Everything blew to smithereens and there was nothing left, not even the bronze miniature of the race horse Haggerty kept next to the Archbishop’s autographed picture.
Jitzy’s phone rang at 4a.m., some time after the thunder-sound. He tumbled out from under the fleshy arbor that was Francine and drove to the disaster site, now a hosed-down, smoldering heap. The cops threw yellow tape around the whole perimeter and seized everyone inside it as arson suspects. As the first rays of sun peeked over the dirty gray hills, Jitzy had to sit captive while a raincoated shrew with big ATF letters on her back jabbed at him with trick questions:
“So when you got out of your car and approached the building how tall were the flames?”
“What flames? I didn’t see any flames.”
The fire police grilled him three times. Ditto Francine. Ditto Dottie. They went after anyone and everyone whom Haggerty had usuriously screwed. But in the end, like all cops, they targeted the candidate most vulnerable to a case they could actually win, guilt or innocence aside. And this was Haggerty himself.
The motive the D.A. cited in court was the kind that always sways juries of common citizens. A whopper of an insurance policy whose sole beneficiary was Haggerty. So fat was the award he actually doubled his net worth the moment the last lighter blew towards Jupiter.
Haggerty pulled every string in his vest pocket, but even the Archbishop’s secret visit to the judge’s chambers could not stem the onslaught of pyro-experts brought to the witness stand by the blood-sniffing D.A.
“I personally found accelerant traces at various points in the rubble,” testified a state college prof, the very one who taught the six-week arson crash course that gave the fire marshal his credentials for office.
“Jesus Christ knows I make cigarette lighters,” screamed Haggerty, terrifying the jury. “Accelerants are my business. “
In the end the gavel banged and Haggerty drew a ten. All his uptown lawyers could do for him was win Corrections Department assurance that he’d do his time in a facility where he’d be safe from assaults on his property and his bum.
So the feudal baron Haggerty, like the peon Jitzy, went off to spend his sunset years living in a room he didn’t own - a room so many notches down from Motel Six and Econo-lodge it made the Holiday Inn seem like The Four Seasons. Like Jitzy, he never had to buy toilet paper.
And all he could do with his Normandy Tudor mansion was continue making the payments, using the sum from the insurance settlement, which a civil judge reduced considerably after the arson conviction.
One day well into year three of the sentence, Jitzy came to see him in an entrepeneurial flush. He proudly pulled out a smashing sales report and traced the columns with a pencil, giving Haggerty the history as he went along. Ever since the lighter business went to hell the night of the blaze, Jitzy had quietly thrown his energy into the second and weaker product line, Dispoz-a-flash flashlights - whose warehouse and inventory sat in another town, uncooked and clean as a whistle.
Watching the firemen comb through the black wreckage with their long heavy lamps had given Jitzy an idea. He began calling on municipalities, positioning his compact, featherweight disposable flashlights as a space-age ergonomic tool enhancing firefighter agility. At first no one listened. But inevitably…
“Detroit wants twenty thousand,” he exclaimed across the table to Haggerty, pushing the spreadsheet under the prisoner’s mortuary eyes. “We can roll this out everywhere.”
But all Haggerty rolled out was a cello-pack with his daily meds, the generic uppers and downers dispensed by the state. He swallowed three tabs and sat like a stone statue, cold as one of the lions that flanked his former driveway, until the guard said time was up. In captivity, all the fire and brimstone was gone.
Even wearing his highest elevator shoes, Jitzy was a peanut compared to the burly penitentiary officers. He trotted past the last of them and then ran into one more, at the dirt lot beyond the ancient brick and shiny razor wire where they had made him leave his car. He was patted down and finally allowed to set forth on the long ride home, a solo journey that gave him three good hours to reflect on Haggerty’s complete implosion behind bars.
The man was a yellow bag of bones, as burned out as his storehouse of Dispoz-a-flames. He was Haggerty mourning Haggerty.
More than ever, Jitzy saw it was immaterial whether Haggerty had ever lit the match. His crime wasn’t arson; it was ownership: the belief in his own divine right to possess whatever he touched: people, places, chunks of the earth - as if the whole round world - the oceans and seas and trees and warehouses and slaughterhouses and even the Big House - weren’t what they were: all one fucking Holiday Inn where everybody was just a guest with a checkout time.
Jitzy drove under the happy green sign and found his favorite space, right under the tier of balconies. The year was rolling around to the season of cheer, and the air was crisp as a red apple. He went up three flights in the elevator and unlocked the door to Room 303. A present was waiting for him on the freshly made bed - Francine on all fours, her hair long and silvery as tinsel. He ripped off his suit from the boys’ department and slid under her, watching the hair cascade around his face, a forest of tinsel just for him. Then he moved down and found her breasts, dangling before his eyes like Christmas bells. Flat on his back he inched forward - until they just bumped the sides of his face.
What she said to him was out of a dream. And maybe it was a dream.
“My father was a big man. I want a little man.”
When he raised his head a bit he could see between her legs to the wall, where his sturdy Dispoz-a-flash case stood filled with flashlight samples in engine red and safety yellow, everything ready to go. On top of the case was his plane ticket.
Tomorrow, the Chicago Fire Department. Chicago, Chicago, Chicago.