Stuart Kaminsky - Midnight Pass

There was one message on my answering machine. It was one of the secretaries in the law offices of Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz.

“Mr. Fonesca”-her voice came through flat and dry-“Mr. Tycinker asked me to remind you that he needs those papers served on Mickey Donophin before Saturday. If we do not hear from you, he will assume you are unable to do this and will contact the Freewell Agency.”

I called Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz. There was no one there, but there was an answering machine.

“This is Lewis Fonesca,” I told it. “Tell Mr. Tycinker I’ll have the papers in Mickey Donophin’s hands within twenty-four hours.”

I hung up, got my soap, a towel, toothbrush and toothpaste, and my electric razor and moved toward the rest room I shared with the other tenants and Digger, an otherwise homeless old man, who was standing in front of the mirror over the sink when I went through the door.

“Ah,” he said, looking at me in the mirror. “The little Italian.”

The rest room was almost always clean, which came as a stunning surprise to most visitors. A smiling, retarded man named Marvin Uliaks, for whom I had recently done a job, kept clean the rest room and most of the stores and storefront businesses on the three-block stretch of the seven short blocks of 301 between Main and the Tamiami intersection. He accepted whatever the business owners wanted to give him and smiled even when he was given only a quarter.

“How do I look?” Digger said, turning to me.

He looked like a disheveled mess of a human being who had put on a wrinkled gold tie that had nothing to do with his wrinkled blue-and-red striped shirt and sagging dark trousers.

“Dapper,” I said as he gave me room to get to the sink.

“Got a job interview,” he said over my shoulder, checking his tie in the mirror.

There was no hint of alcohol on his breath. There never was. Digger didn’t drink. He couldn’t afford to. He had told me when we first encountered each other by the urinal a few months ago that he neither drank nor took drugs.

“It’s my mind,” he had said. “Doesn’t function right. I lose days, weeks, get headaches, fall a lot.”

“Where’s the job interview?”

He moved out of the way so I could brush my teeth.

“Jorge and Yolanda’s,” he said, checking his own teeth over my shoulder and rubbing them with his finger.

I held up my tube of Colgate, and he held out a finger for me to drop some toothpaste on it.

“Obliged,” he said as I stepped out of the way after rinsing my mouth so he could work on his teeth.

Jorge and Yolanda’s was a second-floor ballroom-dance studio right across the street. I could see it from my office window.

Satisfied with his teeth, Digger rinsed with a handful of tap water and stepped back. I turned on my razor.

“Want to know what I’ll be doing?” he asked.

To the hum of my razor, I looked at him in the mirror and said, “Yes.”

“Dancing,” he said.

“Dancing?”

I stopped shaving.

“They have dances for their clients and prospective clients every Friday night,” he said. “They need extra men because they have more women than men. What’re you looking at me like that for? I’m a terrific dancer. Anything, you name it, waltz, tango, fox-trot, rumba, swing. You name it. I get fifteen bucks and all the appetizers I can eat every Friday night providing I don’t make a hog of myself.”

Digger used to be a pharmacist. He sometimes slept in a closet of one of the twenty-four-hour Walgreen’s. There was a seemingly infinite number of Walgreen’s and Eckerd drugstores in Sarasota, an even greater number of banks, and a supply of cardiologists, oncologists, and orthopedic surgeons that probably rivaled Manhattan’s.

I knew little about Digger’s past, didn’t want to know more.

“Sounds great,” I said, returning to my shaving. “Good luck.”

He looked at himself in the mirror again.

“Haven’t got a chance, have I?”

“Not a chance in the world,” I said, finishing my shave and checking my face for places I might have missed.

“What the hell. I said I was coming in, answered an ad in the paper. Said I was coming in. What the hell? It’s just across the street. What have I got to lose? You know?”

He started to loosen his tie.

“Got this tie at the Goodwill for a quarter,” he said. “Real silk, just this little stain where you can’t even really notice, but what the hell.”

“What time’s your appointment?” I asked, washing my face.

“Just said I should drop by some time after ten, but what the hell.”

“You’ve got time to shave, use a comb, get a pair of pants that fit, a white shirt, and a pair of socks and shoes at the Women’s Exchange.”

The Women’s Exchange consignment and resale shop was a few blocks down Oak Street.

“That’d cost,” he said, looking at me with eyes showing a lot of red and little white.

“How much?”

I dried my face.

“Ten, fifteen bucks,” he said.

I fished out a twenty and held it out. Digger took it.

“I gotta pay this back?” he asked.

“Get yourself something at the DQ if there’s anything left,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Digger said, some of his confidence returning. “This isn’t a precedent.”

“I know,” I said. “Good luck.”

“Thanks. I tell you something? Now that the twenty is in my pocket?”

I nodded.

“You never smile.”

I nodded again.

“Some things are funny,” he said.

“Some things.”

“I mean, I’m not talking about a big smile like one of those yellow stickers. Just something besides doom and gloom.”

I imagined Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, pushing up the corners of her mouth into a pathetic smile when her brute father ordered her to smile.

“I’m working on it,” I said, towel folded around my soap and shaving gear. “Know any jokes?”

“Couple maybe, if I can remember them,” he said. “Never could remember jokes. Wait, I’ve got one.”

He told it. I took out my notebook and wrote it down. The list for Ann Horowitz was growing. I already had the start of a second-rate stand-up act.

Digger looked as if he had something more to say but couldn’t come up with it.

“Wish me luck,” he said, going out the rest-room door ahead of me.

“Luck,” I said, and headed back to my office.

There were three new messages on my answering machine. I didn’t play them back. I knew I had a dying politician to find and not much time to do it and some papers to serve for the law firm of Tycinker, Oliver, and Schwartz, but there were other things more important at the moment, like spending the day on my cot sleeping when I could, watching a video of Panic in the Streets or A Stolen Life. I was trying to cut back on my dosage of Mildred Pierce.

I took off my pants and shirt, draped them on the wooden chair, and lay down after removing my shoes.

I didn’t have to sleep. Dreams came while I was awake. The dying Stark would be added to my sleeping nightmares. My waking dreams always came back to moments with my wife, little moments. A laugh shared across the table at the Bok Choy Restaurant, our buttery fingers meeting in a box of popcorn while we watched a movie I couldn’t remember. Her holding my face in her cool hands and looking into my eyes after we had an argument until I grinned and conceded her victory. Picking out the car in which she was killed.

There was an endless supply of pain. I savored every image, my depression fed on it. It wasn’t simply self-pity. There was some of that, but it was that deep sense of void, loss that I wanted to hold onto and lose at the same time.

I fell asleep before I could insert a videotape. I dreamed of nothing and was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was still light outside. I checked my watch. It was almost seven at night. The sun was going down. I went into the office and picked up the phone a ring before the machine kicked in to take the message.