Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

Her other knee’s propped up. I pull her gown down to cover her pussy, which still has a blue tampon string hanging out of it, and which anyone walking into the room can see.

“Who gives a shit?” she says. “No one’s going to ever want me again.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “Thousands of people will want you.”

“Yeah. Losers who think they can trade up by fucking a gimp.”

Huh. Seems pretty astute to me. “Where’d you get a mouth like that?” I ask her.

“I’m sorry,” she says, sarcastically. “None of the boys are gonna want to take me dancing. ”

“Sure they will,” I say. “Down at the hop.”

“You fucker!” she says.

I wipe the tears off her cheeks. “I have to go.”

“Kiss me, you asshole,” she says. I do.

I’m still doing it when there’s a throat clearing noise behind me. It’s two surgery techs come to wheel her away so she can get her leg cut off.

“Oh shit I’m scared,” she says when they lift her to the stretcher bed. She’s holding my hand, which is sweating.

“You’ll be okay,” I say.

“They’ll probably cut off the wrong leg.”

“That’s true. But the second time they operate it’ll be harder to fuck up.”

“Fuck you.”

They wheel her away.

When I get beeped to the ER by a doctor I know who works there, I think: No problem.

It’s on my way out.

Just outside the ER I pass the fuckhead who tried to mug me this morning. He still hasn’t been examined yet, since long wait times are how they discourage people without insurance from coming to the ER. His face is covered with blood, and he’s holding his broken arm. When he sees me he jumps off his stretcher and gets ready to run, but I just wink at him as I jog by.

Under less extreme circumstances, I love emergency rooms. People who work there are as slow and calm as houseplants. They have to be, or they fuck up and burn out. And in the Manhattan Catholic ER you can always find the doctor who paged you, because it’s all been one open space since an incident you really don’t want to know about. [55] All right, fine. A nurse there turned out to be keeping his patients tied up and sedated for days at a time while he “experimented” on them.

The doctor is hosing out a low-back knife wound on a patient who’s writhing and screaming but being held in place by a couple of nurses.

“What’s up?” I ask her.

“The ER’s a fucking nightmare,” she says, sedately.

“Sorry, I’m in a hurry. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a biker status post–motorcycle accident with heavily contused testicles.”

“Okay.”

“And he’s mute.”

“He’s mute? ”

“That’s right.”

“Can he hear?”

“Yes.”

So he’s probably not mute.

I look at my watch, like it’s going to say, “Ten minutes to hitmen.”

“Show me,” I say.

She puts down the sprayer and takes me over.

The biker’s not some jackass with a weekend Harley. He’s an actual biker-gang biker, like from Gimme Shelter. He’s got green tattoos and is wearing sunglasses in the Emergency Room. There’s a bunch of ice packs on his groin, with his purple and black water-balloon scrotum showing through them.

“Can you hear me?” I ask him.

He nods.

I squeeze his nose shut. He looks surprised, but not as surprised as when he realizes he’s not strong enough to claw my hand off his face.

Eventually he opens his mouth to breathe, and I take the bag of heroin out.

I toss it to the doctor. “Okay?” I say to her.

“Thanks, Peter,” she says.

“Any time,” I say, wishing it were true.

I walk out through the ambulance entrance.

After I got out of jail, I didn’t give a shit about anything but Magdalena.

We moved into an apartment in Fort Greene, close enough but not too close to her parents, and spent all our time together. If she went out to play a gig I drove her and lurked nearby.

Twice a week we went to see her family. Her parents were polite, but got teary-eyed every time. Rovo, Magdalena’s brother, seemed in awe of me, a fact that shamed but also flattered me.

My other family, the Locanos, I avoided to the extent that I could. I owed them and they owed me, and beyond that everything was broken. I don’t know how many friends you can stand to hear talking about you on tape like that, calling you “The Polack” and appearing to give no shit whatsoever about what kind of trouble they’re getting you into. I don’t know how many friends could stand knowing you’ve heard those tapes, either. We started disentangling from each other, but slowly to be safe.

Skinflick, meanwhile, just seemed bewildered. What we’d gone through together at the Farm was now useless to him. What was he going to do, come out now and say he’d whacked the Karcher Boys? Helped whack the Karcher Boys, even? Shot an injured fourteen-year-old in the head while I was off getting the car?

It had all been for nothing, and now it wasn’t so much shame as envy I felt from him. Even after I got out of jail, we barely spoke.

The worst thing was that I couldn’t avoid the wider mafia. Within the “LCN community,” and among its many hangers-on, I had achieved the worst kind of celebrity: the kind where people you don’t know recognize you instantly as a cold-blooded killer, and love you for it. Those lowlifes had paid for my defense, and they were touchy, vain, insecure, and dangerous. I could turn down some of their invitations, but not all of them. There was a limit to how hard I could snub them.

At least the mob guys didn’t want me to go back to killing people. They understood that the myth that I was now bulletproof because the government would be too embarrassed to ever charge me with anything again was worth a lot more to them untested. [56] Time between John Gotti being nicknamed “The Teflon Don” and getting sent to prison for life: eighteen months. But fuck those assholes wanted me around. It was during that time that I met Eddy “Consol” Squillante. Among many, many others.

“Assholes” really doesn’t do them justice, by the way. Those fuckheads were hideous. Proudly ignorant, personally repellent, absolutely convinced that their willingness to hire someone to beat money out of someone who worked for a living constituted some kind of genius and an adherence to a proud tradition. Though whenever I asked one of them about that tradition—the one thing I was interested in hearing about from those slimehags—they’d usually clam right up. I never knew whether this was because of the oath they’d taken or because they just didn’t know anything. Though I never stopped asking, because, at the least, getting those fuckers to shut up was its own kind of victory.

Skinflick invited me to a couple of parties at the apartment he’d moved into on the Upper East Side. If I went I’d show up when I thought it would be the most crowded, seek him out to shake his hand, and leave. He’d say something like, “I miss you, dude,” and I’d say, “Me too,” and in a way it would be true. I’d miss something, and whatever it was, it was definitely gone.

In fact, if I’d only had more faith in that—in how dead things had become—I might have been able to save all of us.

It was April 9, 2001. I was home, but Skinflick called me on my cell phone. It was night. I was waiting for Magdalena to get back from playing an anniversary party. I had recently bought her a car.

Skinflick called me and said, “Dude, fuck, I am in huge huge trouble. I am fucked . I need your help. Can I come pick you up?”