Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

I stopped laughing right away. He was teaching me. I leaned against him and we waited for Mama to calm down and then I went and got the spring and I put it in his hand.

Now this morning I’m holding the pistol and it feels heavy, a good pound heavier than the Makarov, and that’s a lot if you want to hold a pistol steady to shoot straight. I hold it with two hands and I reach my fingers up and they curl around the trigger. Just barely, but it’s okay. That surprises me, but I forget sometimes that I’m still growing. So I’ve got my fingers on the trigger and the pistol is wobbling around and I’m crying. That pisses me off a lot. My daddy’s making me cry now and it’s a good thing he’s not walking in that door right now cause I know I’d blow his fucking brains out.

I scrunch up my shoulder and dry my eyes on it, never letting go of the 1911, and then I try to just settle down. I pull the pistol up in front of me and it’s still a little loosey goosey, but my chest kind of goes up and down and I swallow hard and the tears have stopped and the stuff I’m feeling sort of goes away. I’m supposed to see Ivan this morning, and I think what the hell. I slide my one 1911 magazine into the pistol and put it in my paper bag.

Later, I’m ready to go out and I’m passing through the kitchen and there’s my sorry-ass mama sitting at the table in her slip. It’s hot and she’s fanning herself with a magazine and I stop. She looks up at me and smiles.

“You don’t always have to make your own lunch,” she says nodding at my paper bag and her voice is real tiny and she’s still staring at the bag.

“I don’t ever see you in clothes,” I say to her.

“I ain’t got no nice clothes,” she says. “There ain’t no clothes stamps.”

“How much you need to buy yourself a lot of nice clothes?” I ask her.

“Need?”

“How much money’d that cost?”

She looks down at her toes and laughs at this. “I got expensive tastes,” she says.

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars would about do it,” she says.

“Okay,” I say and I go out.

I go into the Black Sea Social Club and Ivan’s in the back of the place shooting pool with one of the other guys I never talk to. A third guy, Nick, is sitting drinking a beer at a table. When Ivan sees me coming to him, he puts his cue down and circles around the table.

“There’s the man,” he says.

“Ivan.”

“You have your lunch bag. Good.”

I lift the bag for him. It feels heavy. I think maybe I should go back home for the Makarov before I head to Brighton.

“I have good job for you,” Ivan says and he eases his butt back onto the edge of the pool table. “Important job.”

“Okay,” I say.

“A man at oyster restaurant on Mulberry Street.”

“Mulberry Street? That’s not in Brooklyn.”

Ivan stands up again, and he comes to me and my neck is cricked back as far as it’ll go to look at his face. I ease a few steps away and he eases with me so I’m still looking way up. I don’t like it. “This is not Russian gang,” he says. “This is worse thing. Mafia. You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Why you ask that?” I say. “Shit no.”

“Good,” he says. “The Mafia, they eat little kids in their restaurants.”

Ivan hasn’t talked like this to me since the first job. I guess he thinks he needs to start from scratch to get me to waste some Mafia don, but he’s got that wrong and I’m beginning to get itchy.

“I’ll do it,” I say, and I step back from him and he lets me. My neck stops cricking and I’m feeling a little better.

“Good,” Ivan says.

Then the guy behind him says, “You win respect down there, they make you boss of Bambino family.”

Ivan looks over his shoulder at this guy and I think he’s unhappy with him, but when Ivan turns his face back to me, he’s smiling. I know what a bambino is. But I let it pass. Ivan’s been okay to me.

“Look,” I say, “I got no problem doing this. I want ten thousand dollars.”

Ivan’s head kind of snaps. Then he gets this thing in his voice. “This is a lot of money,” he says. “You know how much money this is?” And his voice is all stretched and gooey.

“I know how much it is. I want that.”

“I give you three hundred. That’s fifty percent raise.”

“Ten thousand or forget it,” I say and I say it hard enough so that he knows I mean it.

Ivan’s sunken cheeks suck in some more. “Listen now,” he says. “I give you very good gun. I give you a lot of money for little kid.”

I straighten up and cock my head. “Wait,” I say to him.

“No, you wait for me,” he says. “I am doing good things for you all the time. You are not appreciating me.”

“Fuck you,” I say.

Now his face pinches and he slits his eyes at me. “You can’t talk like that to Ivan. You got nothing till Ivan does things for you. You got nobody in world but Ivan. I am father to you.”

This makes sense. So I go into the brown bag and out comes the 1911 and it’s in my two hands and my first shot shatters the light over the pool table. We all of us just stand for a second after that and it’s real quiet. Then the guy behind Ivan goes into his coat and the 1911 is flopping around in front of me like a goddamn can opener but I see his hand move and I follow it and my next shot is in the center of this guy’s chest and he flies back. Now Nick is standing and I take him out with one in the shoulder and he’s looking there like he doesn’t know whose body this is and the next one in his throat and he’s down.

And I’ve still got Ivan. He’s grabbing around at his chest, maybe to see if he’s hit, maybe reaching for a gun, which he doesn’t seem to have. He looks at me and he says something in Russian. Probably something about being my fucking father. I put the next shot way up there in the center of his forehead and he flies back and the place is very quiet again and my real daddy’s gun is feeling like it doesn’t weigh anything at all, it’s just floating there in my hands like it’s part of me.

That was a few hours ago. I’m sitting in Tompkins Square Park and off somewhere behind me I can hear the swing chains creaking and I know I’m going to have to make a few plans soon. Some things are tough the first time you do them and then you get used to them. Some things you only need to do once. I figure if I ever meet up with my daddy now, him and me could maybe just talk.

Bring on the sports heroes and the U.S. senators and the middle management bosses and the bad-seed uncles and the boyfriends your mama brought home from the cheap bars for the night, bring them to me and let them put their hands on me and their lips on mine and I’ll kill the sons of bitches, giving them what they want. I might as well. Because the men I love, the ones who come to me gentle and speak sweetly and take it slow and look me in the eyes and try their hardest to do it right, they all die, as it is. From the touch of my lips.

He’s gone for the moment, into the bathroom. He’s surely afraid. He’s so gentle and he must be afraid. I haven’t kissed him yet. The room is white. The sun is coming through the window and the glare from the walls blinds me. I have nowhere to look, it is so pure and so empty. I listen for him. He clears his throat. Even that sound from him, coming through the closed door, has a tiny trembling in it. He is afraid. So am I.

Did I catch this from somebody? In some unprotected moment of passion? It’s possible. How do you protect yourself from passion? And if you can protect yourself, how can it be passion? Must passion be gone from this world forever? Is that what we have to expect from each other if you suddenly find a man looking you in the eyes and you’re sure he’s seeing you and you can see him, real clear, and he says here is my body, take it, from my love for you, and I say here is my own body, I give you the same. If you are to really love each other, do you have to want this thing made of rubber between your sweetest flesh and his? If you find a moment on this earth when there is passion and there is love, shouldn’t this barrier between the two of you make you sadder than death?