Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

I snap the needle off and drop it into the drawer of a sharps box on the wall behind me. Then I take hold of the front of the ID guy’s scrub shirt and drop the hypo chamber into his pocket. “Scrape what you can out of this and analyze it,” I tell him. “Take the Path guy with you.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” the Path guy whines.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” I tell him.

“Dr. Brown,” the Attending says.

“Yes, sir?” I say, still looking at the ID guy.

“Give me a five-minute head start?”

“You left ten minutes ago,” I tell him.

“You’re a mensch, kid. Cheers,” he says as he leaves.

Everyone else stands frozen.

“Stat, you fucking assholes!” I tell them.

I’m almost out of the room when I realize something’s wrong. Something else, I mean.

Duke Mosby’s bed is empty. “Where’s Mosby?” I say.

“Maybe he went for a walk,” one of the med students says, behind me.

“Mosby’s got bilateral pedal gangrene,” I say. “The guy can’t even hobble.”

But apparently he can run.

I believe I’ve already mentioned that Skinflick was in love with his first cousin, Denise. He always had been.

She was two years younger. Skinflick talked about her all the time, often in the context of his Golden Bough bullshit. About how unfair it was that he and Denise couldn’t be together just because of some stupid American prejudice that had no basis in scientific or even historical reality, and how the Sicilians had an expression, “cousins are for cousins,” that was not only more accurate historically but also an excellent piece of advice. [28] Medically it’s not all that clear. A woman who mates with her first cousin adds about 2 percent to her chance of having a kid with a birth defect. (For comparison, a woman who conceives at age forty has a 10 percent chance that the fetus will have Down’s Syndrome.) On the other hand, offspring of cousins may benefit from an increased chance of family stability. Either way, the human genome is already far more “conserved,” i.e., inbred, than that of any other known mammal, so we’ve already done a lot more cousin-jumping than, say, the rat. “Every other fucking thing rednecks do, Americans love,” he used to complain.

After Skinflick and I finished high school we drove across the country to Palos Verdes, south of LA, to visit her.

Denise’s father, Roger, was Skinflick’s mother’s brother. He was suspicious the moment we got there, and it didn’t help that Skinflick and Denise took every possible opportunity to sneak off—or out, or upstairs—and fuck.

Denise’s mother, Shirl, was less of a problem, at least in that way. But in regard to hitting on me, and to getting turned on by the constant humping of her daughter by her nephew, she was a lot more of a problem. Not that I was exactly a saint.

Thankfully, it was Skinflick and Denise who Roger caught in the guesthouse, not me and Shirl. Roger exiled Skinflick from the house. Denise sobbed. In a sordid way it was romantic.

Skinflick and I backed off all the way to Florida, as if the point of our trip had been time on the beach. We had dinner with my father for a couple of nights running, which was pleasant enough. Silvio was selling boats and real estate at the time, and was in a phase of his life where he kept smiling and spreading his hands and saying, “Who can know about these things? Tell me that.” He may still be in that phase. Last time I spoke to him was when he came to visit me in jail during my trial. [29] I should admit here that my failure to communicate with my parents has been more than just a WITSEC formality. You’re allowed to exchange messages and even talk on the phone with your family through the Virginia clearinghouse, and if you do this often enough the agents will eventually “slip up” and give your family your direct contact information. I just never tried.

Skinflick, meanwhile, continued to bitch and moan about Denise for the rest of the summer—even, charmingly, while we were out with other women.

He also continued to fail to progress athletically. His father kept urging me to teach him to fight, but Skinflick was naturally terrible at combat sports. He would try to protect his face and stomach by twisting away, which exposed his spine, his kidneys, and the back of his skull. His reflexes were good, but without willpower they just made him flinchy.

Skinflick and I had changed our minds about continuing with school by then and enrolled at Northern New Jersey Community College. We were living in a condo together in Bergen County. We both continued to laugh off Skinflick’s klutziness, since at that point I still respected him for other reasons.

I saw Denise three more times. Once was in the lobby of a hotel in midtown Manhattan before she and Skinflick went upstairs to fuck. I don’t remember what year that was. The second and third times were in August of 1999, on the night before and then the night of her wedding.

This was four and a half years after I had gone to Poland. In the meantime I had finished my two-year degree at Northern New Jersey Community College (which Skinflick had left after one year), helped Skinflick run a “record label” (paid for by David Locano) into the ground (it was called Rap Sheet Records, good luck finding anything), and went with Skinflick to work as a paralegal at David Locano’s four-partner law firm, from which we were subsequently fired by a vote of the three other partners, apparently for spending too much money entertaining clients while not doing anything else. Fair enough.

At the time David Locano was still maintaining to both of us that he didn’t want Skinflick to join the mafia. Which was probably even true, to the extent that any father can really want his child to surpass him or be different from him. But to warn us about what the life was like, and as a penalty for flunking out of the law firm, he sent us to work at a garbage truck dispatch facility in Brooklyn. And it’s hard to see that as anything but a Very Bad Move.

For one thing, it wasn’t much of a penalty. It was dreary and boring, but it was easy. It gave you a lot of time off. And it was impossible to get fired from, since all we were getting paid for was being connected to David Locano.

Also, some of the lowlifes, particularly the nostalgic ones, were interesting. Grown men named Sally Knockers or Joey Camaro, [30] Supposedly from the expression “bitchin Camaro.” He did kind of complain a lot. who cowered in front of the blow-dried scumbags who came by doo, free ties a week to pick up half the take. Some of the scumbags were interesting too.

Kurt Limme comes to mind. Limme was about ten years older than we were. He was undeniably handsome, and well dressed for real, not goombah. He seemed like an uncle you might have in Manhattan who was making a killing as a stockbroker and fucking a lot of women. In reality he was under indictment for a series of extortion schemes involving the installation of cell phone relay towers, but even that seemed to be relatively forward thinking.

Skinflick fixated on him as a guy who was as cool, cynical, and relaxed—if not quite as smart—as Skinflick was. And who had made it. Limme, meanwhile, being the breakout member of a traditionally low level mob family, appreciated being worshipped by David Locano’s son.

Limme started taking Skinflick with him on his endless errands in the city, which seemed to me to be mostly shopping trips. I knew I should have been discouraging Skinflick from hanging out with him so much, since among other things Skinflick did a lot of cocaine when he was with Limme, but I had started working jobs for David Locano regularly, and was glad Skinflick had someone to entertain him in my absence.