George Pelecanos - Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

McGinnes closed his deal, though, and Donny did not. Afterward, when I had been introduced to the boys and stood with them around the counter, there seemed to be no residual animosity coming off Johnny. Just another way to grab an up, the memory to be filed away by McGinnes under “payback,” to be retrieved the next time a yom came walking through the door.

“So, Tim,” a very serious Donny said to the factory rep. “You read about Maytag in the paper today?”

“No,” Tim said, breathing through his mouth. “What about Maytag?” the="0em" width="27"› “Kelvinator!” Donny said. “Get it? Kelvin… he ate ’er!” Donny cackled, slapped his own knee.

“Ha, ha, ha.” Tim’s laughter and the brittle smile that went with it failed to mask his contempt.

“ ’Course,” Donny continued, “that ain’t nothin’, compared with what the general did.”

“What general?” Tim said, and I saw it coming.

“General Electric!” Donny said. “He was Tappan Amana, dig? Put his Hotpoint right on her Coldspot. Know what I’m sayin’?”

Tim began to turn red. McGinnes walked up to the group, a brown paper bag in his hand. He looked at me and smiled.

“You ready, Jim?” he said.

“I’m ready.”

“Hold on a second,” the manager said.

“What?” McGinnes said.

“I got a belch a few minutes ago,” the manager said. “That’s what. Customer called, said you stepped him off an advertised single-speed washer to what you claimed was a two speed-an LA three-five-nine-five.”

“So?”

“An LA three-five-nine-five is a single-speed washer, too, McGinnes. You told him it had two speeds!”

“It does have two speeds,” McGinnes said. “On… and off.”

“Off’s not a speed, McGinnes!” the manager yelled, but Johnny had already pulled me away, and the two of us were headed for the front door.

McGinnes drew a malt liquor out of the bag and popped the top. He handed the open one to me, found one for himself.

“Off is not a speed!..” The manager’s voice trailed off as we pushed through the store’s double glass doors.

Out in the lot, McGinnes tensed up his face. “All these complaints. I’m gonna get a sick stomach.”

“Had a lot lately?”

McGinnes nodded. “This guy called this morning, all bent out of sha pe. Says when I sold him his refrigerator, I guaranteed him it was a nice box. And the thing’s had three service calls in the last month.”

“So? Did you guarantee it?”

“Hell no! I never said it was a nice box. I said it was an icebox! The guy just misunderstood me.”

“I can’t imagine how that happened, Johnny.”

“The guy was a putz,” McGinnes said. “You know it?”

My first day as a stock boy at Nutty Nathan’s on Connecticut Avenue, back in 1974, I checked out this pale, speeded-out looking Irishman named Johnny McGinnes and I thought, Who is this guy? It didn’t take too long to find out. Shortly after meeting him, I watched him volunteer to microwave the frozen dinner of a visiting district manager, and I pegged him as a brownnose. That notion was dispelled a few minutes later when I walked around the display rack and caught him hawking a wad of spit into the DM’s food, his chest heaving in suppressed laughter as he carefully mixed it in. By the end of the day, I had witnessed him hit his pipe repeatedly, knock down a steady succession of beers, and swallow two suspicious-looking pills, all the time maintaining his mastery of the floor. Then, at closing time, he laid “Willie the Pimp” on the store’s most expensive system, and eighty watts of Zappa were suddenly blowing through a pair of Bose 901s, and Johnny stood atop a vacuum cleaner display, playing air guitar, his bleeding red eyes closed as if in prayer. Even a sixteen-year-old stoner like me could see that Johnny McGinnes was one man who would never grow up.

“You’re drinking too slow,” McGinnes said, as my Dodge pushed up 95.

“ You’re not,” I said. We were nearing Baltimore and the six of tall boys was almost done.

McGinnes gave the radio some volume. “Hey,” he shouted, “how you like being a parent?”

I turned the volume down a notch. “I’m not a parent. A kid’s parents are who raises them, and I’ve got nothing to do with that.”

“Yeah, but”-McGinnes wiggled his eyebrows foolishly-“you gave her your seed, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Johnny, I gave her my seed.”

“So, what did Jackie name the boy?”

“Kent,” I said, and waited for his comment.

“She named him after a cigarette?”

“It’s British or something.”

“Her last name’s Kahn, isn’t it? I thought Kahn was a Jewish name-”

“Shit, Johnny, I don’t know. She liked the name, that’s all.”

I swigged my malt liquor. Some of it ran down my chin. I went to wipe it off and swerved a bit into another lane. Someone reprimanded me with a polite beep and I got the car back between the lines.

McGinnes said, “I don’t like it.”

“What?”

“The name.”

“Why not?”

He raised a finger in the air, like he imagined an academic might do. “You know how k {ou eighids are. I mean, the other boys, on the playground, they’re gonna give him shit about it, twist it all around.”

“I don’t follow.”

McGinnes sighed, exasperated. “You say his name’s Kent, right? Nick, the other kids-well, they’re gonna call him ‘Cunt’!”

“Aw, come on, man…”

“Hey, look!” McGinnes said, pointing through the window excitedly. “Baltimore!”

We stopped in a bar near the stadium, split a pitcher, and watched the first two innings from there. We would have made it for the third, but we got waylaid by the kick-ass food at the concession stands inside the Yards. McGinnes and I both had half smokes smothered in kraut and mustard and two more beers before we got to our seats. By then it was the fourth and the Birds were down by two to the White Sox.

Our seats were in section 330, to the right and way up from home plate. A deaf kid sat alone in front of us, and next to him sat a solid Korean man and his two sons. The Korean ate peanuts the entire game, a mountain of shells at his feet. Behind us a red-bearded, potbellied man loudly heckled the players, with most of his choice obscenities reserved for Sid Fernandez, who that night was truly getting rocked. Near him, a couple of D.C. attorneys in polo shirts talked about how “quaint” the Bromo-Seltzer Tower looked against the open B-A skyline and how D.C. had nothing “like that.” It was the kind of boneheaded conversation you heard from transient Washingtonians every time they went to Camden Yards, as if one old building set against a rather ordinary backdrop had any significance at all. Not that I had anything against this city-Baltimore was a fine town, with top-notch food and bars and good people. But Baltimore wasn’t mine.

“Hey,” McGinnes said, pointing to a vendor. “Let’s get a pretzel, man.”

“I’d love to,” I said. “The trouble is, you gotta put mustard on a pretzel, and I had too much mustard on my half smoke. I feel like it and I don’t feel like it, you know what I mean?”

“A couple more beers, then.” McGinnes whistled at a guy coming up the steps with a tray of them.

We drank those, and another round, and then it was the sixth. The Sox were taking off behind their suddenly hot bats and the awesome heat coming from Jack McDowell on the mound. McDowell’s goateed photograph was up on the telescreen, and McGinnes gestured to it with his head.

“What’s with the goatee action?” McGinnes said, loud and a little drunk. “McDowell looks like a Chink! Like he ought to be servin’ us dinner and shit.”