Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

Smooth, but I wonder am I tasting the vodka or the pretty bottle. You like tequila, Rafael? We stocked tequila when the neighborhood went south of the border. Tequila gets me rowdy. Here, we’ll have a little taste challenge, Chopin versus No Way Jose Cuervo. Tak. Na zdrowie!

That’s firewater, Rafael. Remember I warned you: tequila gets me rowdy.

So, yeah, superstition—we always sat along the stretch. Lester, this half-blind smoke with Parkinson’s, on Social Security, would get there early and save our seats. Frank would buy him dinner—beer and a brat—and stake him to a couple two-dollar bets. What Lester wanted though was hot tips, or what Frank that sumnabitch took to calling hot nips .

No, I ain’t going to explain why, and not cause I’m embarrassed, but cause it’s retarded. Use your imagination. Frank could be a hoot, but he was also one of those guys who like never got past high school humor. Anything he could turn into a sexual innuendo he would—not something I admire in a man. Like there was a horse I picked named Whinny Pooh—cute, right?—that Frank insisted on calling Whinny Poohtang. That’s funny? Like I’m supposed to go tee-hee at a naughty macho word.

Frank that sumnabitch noticed when I read the racing form we’d lose cause I’d pick the horses by their names. I mean, you see a horse named You Bet Your Dupa, well, you got to bet your dupa . Or Lady’s a Tramp—I love Sinatra doing that, so you got to play that little filly. Same when they’d parade the horses around the track. I’d play them by color or how their manes were styled. He’d say, Rosebud, don’t look at their names, don’t look at their manes, female intuition’s blind, just close your eyes and pick. But I couldn’t not peek. Not just cause I hated to miss seeing, but closing my eyes in a crowd gets me light-headed, like my balance is off. Like seasick. Frank that sumnabitch would cover my eyes with his hands, and then he started blindfolding me. In public, I mean. He wore this lucky tie, a souvenir from the Thoroughbred track at Arlington. It was wide and had a sparkly picture of a horse winning by a nose, the jockey whipping him across the finish line. He’d wind that tie around my eyes so there were no distractions to what he took to calling my deal-with-the-devil psychic powers. I played along. But I knew I was faking. I didn’t have no psychic powers, just dumb luck.

Some nights I was on more than others, and overall we were ahead. But instead of getting used to prognosticating, I got dizzy sooner each time, and out of breath. It was giving me anxiety attacks. I’d have to tell myself, Easy, Rosie . I’d concentrate on breathing and feel that lazy sunset through my clothes like through a sail, like summer streaming through my body. Voices would sort themselves out of the crowd noise: someone praying to the Virgin in Spanish, fingering rosary beads in his pocket; newlyweds arguing about money—the woman crying in her heart cause Sportsman’s was her hubby’s idea of a honeymoon; an old man mumbling he’s going to kill hisself before his disease gets too humiliating, but not today, no, today he’ll stay alive to play the ponies. And some creepy voice beside my ear, whispering just to me, but before I could admit to myself what it’s saying, the PA blares, and the voices suck back into the crowd-hum of anticipation. I can smell the horses as their shadows clop by, and Frank opens the racing form, smooths it over my lap, and says in his bedroom voice, “Touch it, Rosebush, touch it like you’re touching…” Use your imagination, Rafael. My hand would be trembling and my finger would move on its own across the racing form like across a Ouija board. I’d be sweating.

I look flushed? Maybe it’s the tequila. But tak , one more won’t hurt. So it’s a little early in the afternoon to be buzzed, so shoot me. What’s na zdrowie in Spanish? Okay, then, Rafael, salute !

So, I’m blindfolded, sweating through my lucky underwear, and it’s like I got super-hearing—I can hear the hooves and creaking wheels, and blood’s pounding behind my eyes like that jockey on Frank’s lucky tie is whipping the sparkle horse across my eyelids as the buggies make the turn home, and Frank’s yelling in his clear tenor voice. It always surprised me when he’d let it loose. I got no idea even what horse we’re cheering. Some long shot maybe I picked at random. One thing Frank never could figure was a long shot.

By the middle of summer the special bank account we opened together for the Four Deuces is up eight grand.

I go, Frank, we got the down payment, let’s quit ahead of the game.

See, I don’t wanta be responsible if we lose it and he realizes there never was psychic powers. But he was a greedy sumnabitch. Then, who ain’t?

There ever something beyond what you could afford you hadda have, Rafael? Not just something you wanted, something you couldn’t live without. Maybe angels don’t have desires like that. You paint, right? Nah, I’m no mind reader—I noticed the colors spattered on the hair of your arms. You a painter like houses or like an artist? You do any of them murals of the Virgin along Eighteenth? The Virgin-of-the-El on Halsted or the Virgin-of-the-Lavanderia on Ashland? My favorite’s the wall by Nuevo Ramon, you know, the giant blue taco Virgin shooting light rays, and hovering beside her’s a two-story-tall bottle of Corona shooting the same rays. I told Frank, Maybe we need a Virgin-of-the-Four-Deuces. And Frank says, Way this neighborhood’s gone, people see Virgins everywhere—cracks in the plaster, rusty water stains under a viaduct, and, Mira! A miracle! And they’re kneeling, lighting candles. What’s next? The Virgin-of-the-Porta-Potty?

Frank could be one irreverent sumnabitch, but a hoot.

That me you’re sketching on that racing form? Let’s see. I won’t be offended. Okay, I’ll wait till it’s finished. You ever paint nudes? Tell you, I had a figure that made men ask would I pose. I might have, too, if they was artists, you know, classy, instead of some jerkoff with a Polaroid who thought he was Hugh Hefner. The real question in life ain’t What would you do? It’s What wouldn’t you? Where do you draw the line?

Tak. Salute!

So, that August there’s a heat wave killing senior citizens, and on Friday, Frank leaves work like a kid ditching school, changes into his lucky track clothes in the car, and we make Sportsman’s early. I’m wondering will the horses run? How can they breathe in a furnace? Right off, Frank that sumnabitch blindfolds me with the sparkle-horse tie and I hit the Daily Double, which we never play. The blindfold’s smothering me, I’m like faint, and I hear them voices in the crowd. That creepy voice is right against my ear—I don’t believe what it’s whispering—use your imagination—and I rip the blindfold off, but there’s no one there but Frank and Lester.

You all right? Frank asks.

Who was just here? I ask him, and he looks at me like I’m crazy.

I’m getting heatstroke, I say, and Frank goes, Cool it, Rosebush, I got the next race figured, anyway.

When he comes back from the window, he’s got cold brewskies for me and Lester. It was that sumnabitch’s way of showing he can win without my dramatics. He bets the whole four bills from the Daily Double on White Owl, a long shot, and loses our wad.

After all his crap about playing names, I can’t help blurting, Who’d play a pony named after a cigar?

Frank says, They named him after the bird of prey, not the cigar.

Bird of prey! That sumnabitch and his bullshit vocabulary. Maybe it was the heat, but every time I thought about “bird of prey” I’d laugh until I was like hysterical. Still breaks me up. Lester bets White Owl with him and there goes all his food stamp money, so neither of them are finding it too funny. I go, Shit, nothing like a healthy laugh to make you feel better, go ahead blindfold me. That cheers Frank up. Hot nips time, Rosebud, he says, hot silver-dollar nips. I can’t win without my Rosebud.