Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

But I’m not going to let it mess me up. I’m going to focus on the things I have to be grateful for — like the fact that Larry’s waiting for me out front like he promised he would be, and that he passes me a big old cup of coffee as soon as I slide into his truck, and that he tracked down Domingo and collected the money D owed me and used it to bail me out, all on the back of a single frantic phone call. Unbelievable. You can count friends like that on one hand — hell, one finger.

“Larry, my man,” I say. “Let me buy you breakfast.”

THE DENNY’S IN the shadow of the freeway next to the jail is the first place a lot of guys go right when they get out, to eat a decent meal and use a toilet with a door. I see a couple of dudes I was in with sitting at the counter — ID bands still on their wrists, property bags at their feet — digging into tall stacks of pancakes and double orders of ham and eggs.

“Tell me what I missed,” I say to Larry across the table.

He forks a sausage into his mouth and shrugs. Syrup glistens on his mustache. He’s a listener, not a talker.

“Anybody die? Anybody hit it big?” I ask.

“It was only two days,” he says.

Yeah, but it sure seemed longer. Probably because I barely slept. The guy in the next bunk moaned and groaned all night, suffering through his dreams, and during the day I was too wound up to nap, surrounded as I was by bad men with bad intentions. I spent all my time guarding my personal space, displaying enough aggression to ward off the jackals but not so much that I riled the tigers. My hands are still shaking. When I lift my glass to drink, orange juice sloshes over the rim.

But back to the good stuff: I’m out, my only friend came through for me, and I’ve got a date this afternoon with Lupe, a beautiful girl I met last week at this pool hall where I shoot sometimes. We’re going to the track, me and her and her kid. She couldn’t get a sitter, so I told her to bring him along. “There’s all kinds of kids there,” I told her. “They love it.”

“How’s work?” I ask Larry.

He shakes his head. “Picked up a couple days drywalling, but it’s slow.”

“Let me talk to my cousin. He’s looking for help on that house in Eagle Rock.”

“You were supposed to talk to him last week.”

“Yeah, but then all this went down.”

I haven’t spoken to my cousin in months because I owe him five hundred dollars. Larry knows this but doesn’t call me on it. He’s cool like that, always has been. What’s crazy is that sometimes I wish he wasn’t. Sometimes I wish he’d haul off and punch me in my lying fucking face.

He slurps his coffee and watches the waitress joke with two cops in the next booth. I remember him contemplating joining the LAPD right after he got married, going on and on about the health insurance and the pension plan. He acted like I was some kind of asshole for pointing out that two DUIs and a burglary conviction might hold him back.

“You’ve got to move out before the first of next month,” he mumbles without looking at me. “Shauna put her foot down.”

Like I couldn’t see this coming. Shauna’s been trying to find an excuse to boot me from their garage since the day I moved in.

“We need someone we can count on for regular rent,” Larry continues. “We’re behind on everything.”

The rent bit is bogus. I’ve only been late once, maybe twice, in almost a year. I haven’t paid for April yet, but it’s only the fifth, and, guess what, I’ve been locked down most of that time. Larry could tell Shauna to back off. He could say, This is my homeboy we’re talking about. But I’ve been married; I understand. And if me staying there is causing him problems, no sweat. I’ll find somewhere else to crash until I get on another roll.

“No worries,” I say, and that’s enough about that. “So this chick Lupe, the one from Hollywood Billiards—”

“By the first,” Larry says, not letting it go.

“Do you think I didn’t hear?”

He’s given up on me. It’s there in his eyes. My hands tighten into fists, and ugly thoughts blaze through my brain. But then I see all the food on my plate and the clear blue sky outside and remember that it’s only me who can bring me down, and everything is fine again. Everything’s great.

LUPE ALMOST BLEW it for me the night we met. She kept smiling from the bar as I hustled some pigeon, and it was so distracting that, for a while, I thought they were a team. I let the guy take me twice for twenty a game, then came on as drunk and stupid and challenged him to another, this time for a hundred. He figured he had a fish on the line and said, “Whatever you want, bro.” I stalled all the way to the eight before putting it away, and then it was him begging for a rematch. I held back in that game too, making my win look like dumb luck. He left grumbling but unable to prove that he’d been had.

His money felt nice in my pocket — easy money always does — and I walked over and introduced myself to Lupe. “Ladies as pretty as you shouldn’t be allowed near the tables,” I said. “You make it hard to concentrate.”

“You still whipped his ass, didn’t you?” she said.

“No thanks to you.”

She was there with friends from the dentist’s office where she worked as a receptionist, somebody’s birthday. I bought the group a round with my winnings, but Lupe was the only one I was interested in. The click of the balls faded, the music, everyone else’s dopey conversations. All I heard was her voice.

I like Mexican girls. That thick black hair. That brown skin. Those dark, dark eyes, full of secrets. And Lupe had this haughtiness that made me smile because it was such a put-on. She tried to act like nothing meant anything to her, like she was in on the joke, but I could see that was just a shield she was using to protect herself. You win a girl like that over, and you’re going to learn what love is all about.

“So what are you,” she asked at one point, stabbing her drink with her straw, “some kind of hustler, some kind of shark?”

“Because that’s not what you’re looking for, right?” I replied. “You’re a mom, got a son to think about. You don’t need another bad boy messing stuff up.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe a little bit bad.”

When her friends started pulling at her to leave, she took out her phone and asked for my number, then dialed it as I gave it to her.

My phone rang, and I put it to my ear and said, “Hello?” staring right at her.

“This is Lupe,” she said. “Call me sometime.” And then off she went, swept away by her scandalized amigas, one of them whispering, “Oh my God. I can’t believe you.”

It wasn’t going to get any better than that, so I hurried home to Larry’s garage, locked the door, and crawled into my sleeping bag before any randomness could ruin a perfect night.

I’M DUE AT Lupe’s at noon, which gives me enough time to pick up my Xterra from Kong’s, where it’s been sitting since I got popped, then drive back to Larry’s and sneak a quick shower while Shauna’s at the store. The hundred dollars stashed in the toe of one of my good shoes isn’t much, but admission is free at Santa Anita today, and they’ve got dollar sodas and hot dogs, so I should be fine.

Lupe lives in North Hollywood with her sister. The two of them and their kids share a condo. Lupe’s sister lived there with her husband, but then he ran off, and when Lupe got rid of her old man, the girls decided to throw in together.

I park in the loading zone in front of the building and give Lupe a call. She’ll be down in a minute. While I’m waiting, I walk to the main entrance and look in through the lobby to the swimming pool in the courtyard. The water is perfectly still, and an old man is reading a newspaper at a table with an umbrella sprouting out of it. It’s nice, nicer than anyplace I’ve ever lived.