Carlin Romano: Philadelphia Noir

I’ve got to make sense of this somehow before the lunatic returns. I am starting to recall a little bit more about Johnny.

I don’t usually chat up customers, but Wednesdays are slow at Ray’s. He wore low-slung jeans and a white T-shirt that stretched tight across the muscles of his chest and back. I was new to the joint-the first female bartender, but I didn’t need to prove myself. Lou, Ray’s son, was a friend of my dad’s. I just wanted a job where I could get paid in cash and stay off the radar of the IRS for a while.

He looked just like all the white, angst-filled hipster dudes you see there or at the Dive or Pope’s-in their grungy T-shirts from Circle Thrift and skinny girl jeans with one leg rolled up so that they can get around the city on their beat-up, expensive vintage bikes. Chain wallets, ironic tattoos, and multiple piercings. I can’t say that he was any different, except he said “please” and “thank you” when I set the PBRs in front of him and he was writing in a red spiral notebook-like the kind you’d use in high school. His wrote feverishly and I imagined it was a screenplay about a misunderstood twenty-something, or a proposal to City Council for a more sustainable Philly, or song lyrics for his Flaming Lips sound-alike band so that they could get another gig at Johnny Brenda’s.

We started talking about what he was writing. He had a rough voice, the voice of a smoker who’d picked up the habit with a vengeance in junior high, though he couldn’t have been too far into his twenties.

He told me he’d always kept a journal. “I know, I’m a pretentious prick. No poetry though,” he added. I asked him what he wrote about. “Deep, dark secrets,” he said. He didn’t look like he’d lived long enough to have anything worth hiding, so I figured he was making shit up. “I write descriptions about places. Like this dirty little bar and that old man over in the Elvis shirt with his head on the table. I wrote a paragraph about you.” He read it to me. He was generous.

I took him home to my latest cheap house on one of those narrow one-way streets without trees-this shitty apartment next to the JC Chinese restaurant. I go to sleep and wake up smelling chop suey. It’s the kind of street where you hear Mexican music playing and jacked-up cars revving at all hours. I don’t mind. I usually sleep through anything, like a dead person. Junk lines my street-crushed Red Bull cans and empty Corona bottles, dirty diapers, and abandoned condoms. Like the rest of the city, South Philly changes from block to block and I happen to live on one where the shades are always drawn shut with yellow miniblinds and the windows sport signs reading, Se cuarta a renta . But the apartment is dirt-cheap and I have lived in worse places.

Johnny had a bike of course, and insisted on taking it inside with us. He didn’t stay the night, which I appreciated. He came back to the bar the next night. I took him home again. He had a tongue ring, which I also appreciated. This went on for a while, not long, maybe three weeks, and always with that stupid Raleigh bike, and then one night when he wasn’t at the bar, I brought someone else home and Johnny showed up at my door, ringing the bell again and again until I answered, and bleated, “But you don’t understand. I love you!”

I told him to get real, get lost, and get a new dive bar to hang out in-try the Royal or Pope’s-not Ray’s anymore. He called me a fucking bitch. I pushed over his bike and he squealed like an adolescent girl, picked up the bike, and pedaled furiously away in his high-top Converse sneakers, never to be heard from again.

Except he had come back.

I consider my next move. I imagine the Inquirer headline: Stupid Bartender Murdered by Moron . As if on cue, the moron walks in.

Tony has changed into yet another Eagles jersey. He seems glad to see me awake. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you, but I figured we’d get lots more done if you wasn’t running loose.” His eyes are bloodshot, but instead of smelling like booze, he smells like Old Spice.

He turns on the big-screen TV plastered next to the family portrait and turns it to the classics sports channel, the one that replays old football games where you already know how it all ends and who wins. “Now, I’m going to pull off this tape and it’s going to hurt, so I’m sorry about that. Don’t scream.” He rips the tape off in one quick motion, taking half my lip with it. I scream. “You’ll scare the dog!” he says. The dog is stretched out across the floor on its back, snoring. He pushes the volume up on the TV so that Howard Cosell’s nasally voice booms out into the room. I am going to die listening to Cosell announcing a bygone two-point conversion. “My ma is down the shore, but she’ll be back before too long, so we got to figure this out quick.”

Maybe if I stall long enough, Granny’ll rescue me. That’s assuming she isn’t an accomplice in whatever this mess is. I’ve seen plenty of these South Philly old ladies, sweeping up the sidewalk in front of the house early in the morning with their teeth still sitting in a jar by the bed. Cross them, and they’ll cold cock you in a second with the broom or whatever else is handy.

Tony picks up a red spiral journal from the doily-covered coffee table. “Johnny wrote a lot about you. I just need to know where the key is. He writes that he’s left it with someone he trusts. Well, I can’t find it here, and believe me, I’ve looked under every doily and cookie jar in the place.”

“I barely knew the kid. We maybe hung around once.”

He frowns. “Oh yeah? Does this sound like you?” He flips to the middle of the book and reads a description of my apartment with the rusty kitchen sink and the rats scrabbling in the walls. He describes what I look like in bed and the color of the mole under my right arm. Tony snaps the books shut and pushes up the sleeve of my shirt. “What a coincidence! This shit about you goes on for pages and pages. I know Johnny told you something more about where the key is, didn’t he? If I can find the key, I can get to the money, and if I get to the money, you got nothing to worry about.”

In fact, Johnny may have mentioned a key of some kind. He was a Chatty Cathy. Problem is, I’m not much of a listener. Still, I would’ve remembered money talk.

“He wrote about you like you was his girlfriend,” Tony says, waving the notebook under my nose.

“We were fuck buddies, that’s it.” His eyes flick to the Jesus on the wall. “We weren’t going steady or anything. He didn’t hand over his old high school letter jacket from St. Nick’s. I don’t know about any of this.”

“You know the A &M garage across the street from Ray’s? He keeps his bikes in that place. You know that?” I nod. “You ever wonder what else he might have tucked away in there? You ever wonder why he was delivering office paper at two in the morning?”

Working as a bartender teaches you pretty quick that people will eventually spill whatever it is that’s gnawing at them. All you have to do is wait. And so I wait. And keep telling him that I don’t know anything about a key. And wait some more. Repeat my innocence. Then shut my mouth, praying he doesn’t beat the shit out of me or worse.

He paces the room. I notice he’s not any wearing shoes, just long white athletic socks pulled up to the knees. I suppose we’re both shoeless so the carpets don’t get messed up. He explains the “sitch.” Johnny was a drug courier-some of his friends were too, but he was the head honcho, the numero uno courier. The drugs were shipped from New Jersey to Johnny’s storage place at A &M in bicycle frames. Johnny would then distribute the bikes to his other courier pals to take apart so they could peddle their wares to various eager customers far and wide across the City of Brotherly Love.