George Pelecanos - Nick's trip

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” she said evenly, with the weary resistance born in beauties like her. Her push-up bra had set her lightly freckled, perfectly rounded breasts to a point where they touched and hung like trophies on the edge of her low-cut gown. She had a mane of wheat hair and a black mole above her arched lip. In the midsixties I had experienced one of my first erections while admiring such a mole on Anne Francis’s lip during an episode of “Honey West,” though at the time I did not even possess the beneficial knowledge of self-relief.

“I’m not an accountant,” I said, and hit my bourbon. By now I had forgone the ice, which was taking up far too much room in the glass.

“Really,” she declared aridly. “What are you, then?”

“A mole,” I said, still watching her lip. “I mean, as in spy. I was sent by an industrial espionage firm to infiltrate this party.”

She caught the reptilian gleam of my eye. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, without the barest trace of levity, “unless you are a mole who happens to be very, very wealthy.” Then she walked to the glass and turned her back to me, sipping her drink as she took in the view.

I was studying the arrogant little ball of her calf and the manner in which her dress was painted onto her luscious championship ass when Jackie walked over and stood by my side. Thankfully she was smiling.

“What’s slithering around in that mind of yours right now?” she asked.

“The truth?” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“I was thinking how, right now, I’d like to see her place her palms on that glass and lean over just a bit. How I’d lift up that dress, lift it with my forearms as my hands slid up the back of those tanned thighs. How I’d pull down those sweet panties, put one of my hands on the glass for support, and the other on her fine ass. How I’d enter that moist mound, not too gently mind you, hard enough to see her bite down on her lip and shut her eyes, shut her eyes slowly and peacefully like some Disney deer.” I gulped some bourbon, rocked back on my heels, and exhaled. “So, in answer to your question, I was just thinking what I’d do with that if I had the chance. What were you thinking?”

“Same thing, brother,” Jackie said with a low, sinister chuckle. “Different method.”

On the way home Jackie and I stopped at Rio Loco’s, a neighborhood Tex-Mex bar at Sixteenth and U and found a couple of stools in the back near the juke. Lou Reed’s “Vicious” was just ending. Our blue-jeaned waitress set down a juice glass that contained two inches of Grand-Dad, and a mug of coffee for Jackie. We tapped receptacles and sipped our respective poisons.

“You mad at me?” I asked.

“Uh-uh. You were a hit tonight. A bunch of my friends asked me about you.”

“Sorry about the kiss. The weird thing was, when Smiley was coming on to you, I was jealous.”

“You’re loaded,” she said flatly. “So don’t start analyzing things, not tonight.”

“Right.” I winked and had another taste. The juke was now playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

“There must be something missing in your life,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I mean there must be a reason why you drink like you do.”

“Christ, Jackie, not now. There’s work time and there’s drinking time.” I raised my glass. “Okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry. But I want to talk to you about something, something really important.”

“Sure,” I said, and put a cigarette in my mouth. Jackie lit a match, and I pulled her hand in until the flame touched the tobacco. I blew the match out with my exhale. “Let’s talk.”

“Not tonight. It’s too important, like I said. I want your head to be clear when we discuss it.”

“When, then?”

“You free for dinner Sunday night?”

“I guess so.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

I kissed Jackie good night and climbed into my icy Dart. It started after a few attempts and I pointed it northwest. There wasn’t much action on the streets except for other drunks and cops too warm in their cars to bother. I parked in front of Lee’s apartment building and listened to “Cemetry Gates” on the radio until it was finished. Then I ran across the hard frozen ground to her stairwell and rang her buzzer.

After what seemed like a very long while her door opened. She was wearing a brown-and-green flannel shirt and, from what I could tell, little else. She began to shiver as soon as the door was open. I had woken her up and she wasn’t smiling. Her very green eyes had picked up the green off the shirt.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” My tongue was thick and I was leaning on the door frame for support.

“It’s late, Nick. I’ve got a final tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry, Lee.” I smiled hopelessly and felt my upper lip stick clumsily to my front teeth. “I thought…”

“I know what you thought,” she said in a low voice that began to build. “There’s lipstick on your cheek, hard liquor on your breath, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and you’ve got a hard-on. You thought you’d slide on in here and relieve yourself, that’s what you thought. Well, think about this. You mean something to me, Nick, in a strange way, but the next time you disrespect me like this, it’s going to be the last time. Understand?”

Before I could tell her that I certainly did, the door was closing with a thudding finality. I stared at it for a minute and then walked back to my car. I drove around the corner to May’s on Wisconsin where my bookie friend Steve Maroulis let me in the bar entrance. We had a nightcap together under the cruel lights of last call. I asked him a couple of questions about local gambling and wrote down the answers so I wouldn’t have to ask him again. I think I downed another drink while he closed up and did the paperwork. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I awoke fully clothed on a made bed, that I realized I had driven myself home.

There was a story that used to be told around town concerning my grandfather and Lou DiGeordano that almost attained the status of local folklore, until the men telling it began to die off and it began to die off with them.

My grandfather, Nicholas (“Big Nick”) Stefanos, came to this country from a village in Sparta just after World War I, leaving behind his wife and young son. Like almost three quarters of Sparta’s male population in those years, he came to America to make a quick fortune and to escape the horrible rural poverty that resulted from the new government’s disorder and indifference after the Greek War of Independence. He had every good intention of returning to Sparta, but as it happened his wife died from tuberculosis and his son was raised by relatives in the village. His son eventually married another young woman in the village and out of that union I was born. My parents sent me to the States at a very early age with the intention of joining me in a year or two, but again, as things happen, they never made it. nsw Consequently I was raised by my grandfather in D.C. Having never known my parents, I can almost truly say that I’ve never missed them, though I’m sure some eager psychiatrist could bleed me dry with a lifetime of sessions and related explanations as to why I’ve become this person that I have.

Big Nick spent Prohibition living with relatives and driving a bootlegger’s truck in upstate New York. I imagine he was also some sort of a strong-arm man, as he had the bulk, and I’ve heard several old-timers claim that he was quick with his clubbish hands. He himself told me, without remorse and in fact with a bit of light in his eyes, that he had done some “bad things” in those years to get by. I know he packed a pistol; an Italian. 22 had blown up in his face around that time and given him a lifelong scar on his cheek, which explained his fondness for American firearms, witnessed by the fact that he carried a pearl-handled. 38 Smith amp; Wesson in his jacket pocket until he died. There is a photograph of him in my possession that says more about those years than he ever could. He is in a dark, wide-lapelled pinstriped suit, and he’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The hat is pulled down over one eye. There is a young blonde wearing a floral-print dress in the edge of the photograph, obviously an American woman, and she is looking up at him and laughing. It’s easy to guess from his cocksure grin why that young man never returned to the village.