Siegel, James - Derailed

Salsa music was blaring from two enormous speakers. Spanish was flowing freely around the room.

Everyone seemed coupled up, but they were oddly paired. The women were dressed up — short flashy skirts and high heels. The men wore dirty jeans and T-shirts. It took me a while to understand what was going on.

The women were hostesses. That’s the way one of them introduced herself—first in Spanish, huéspeda . Then in English, when I looked perplexed and she got a good look at me and realized I wasn’t her usual clientele.

For a moment she hesitated, as if she expected me to realize my mistake and leave. But when I stood there and waited politely for her to continue, she did.

“I’m Rosa,” she said. “Want a hostess?”

“Yes,” I said. “Fine.”

Return for a minute to that moment I was taken out of the hole in the ground that had once been the Fairfax Hotel.

I was laid on the sidewalk as they waited for the ambulances and doctors to arrive. They came out with other bodies; they placed a dying Vasquez next to me on the ground.

The fireman who laid him there was covered in soot. His eyes were like white ash on burning charcoal. He asked me if I was okay.

I said yes. I could hear the faint wail of a rushing ambulance. I knew I had just a few minutes.

When the fireman went back in for more bodies, I leaned over Vasquez as if I were comforting him. Seeing if he was all right. I put my hands into his pockets. First the front pockets, then the back.

In his front pockets was some change. A vial with white powder in it. Some matches.

His back pocket was bulging with his wallet. I quickly removed it and put it in my pocket.

I got up and left.

In the taxi to Forest Hills I rifled through it, returning the favor Vasquez has done for me in the Fairfax Hotel.

In this wallet: a phony police badge; a suspicious-looking driver’s license; more white powder wrapped in aluminum foil; two hundred dollars; a business card for something called the Crystal Night Club. Proprietor listed as Raul Vasquez.

On the back was some Spanish writing. Veinte-y-dos . . . derecho, treinta-y-siete izquierdo, doce . . . derecho.

The next morning, the morning I woke in blackface, I looked it up on-line. Google.com — Spanish Dictionary.

Once I translated the first word, I knew they were numbers.

Twenty-two right.

Thirty-seven left.

Twelve right.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t a football play.

This is the way it worked in the Crystal Night Club.

You ordered overpriced drinks, and Rosa talked to you.

That’s what the other men were doing.

Rosa explained it to me, as something to talk about.

“You ain’t no wetback,” she said. “That’s what we get in here. Usually,” she added, not wanting to offend me.

“Where do you come from?” I asked her.

“America,” she said, "where do you think?”

“No. I meant where do you live?”

“The Bronx,” she said. “All of us do. We get bused in.”

“Oh.”

“These guys” — she pointed around the room with evident disdain — “they live on crews. You know . . . like six to a room.”

“And they come here to drink.”

“Right,” she said with a little smile, as if I’d said something funny, “to drink. Want another?” she asked me, reminding me that that’s exactly what I was doing. Drinking.

I’d barely touched my ten-dollar tequila sunrise, but I said sure.

“They’re lonely,” she added after making a hand signal to the man behind the bar. He had a thick neck festooned with tattooed crosses. “They come here to like . . . you know, bullshit. They got no one to talk to. No one female, ” she said. “They like, fall in love with us, you know. They blow all their dinero. ” And she laughed and rubbed her fingers together.

“Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”

“Oh yeah . . . you understand. So what’s your story?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t have one. I just wandered in.”

“Yeah, well, that’s cool.”

Rosa was thick hipped and fleshy — most of the hostesses were. I was picturing Lucinda. I was wondering if she’d worked here, too; I took a gamble.

“Actually,” I said, and Rosa leaned closer, “I came in once before. I think.”

“You think? ”

“I was drunk,” I said. “I think it was the same place. Not sure.”

“Okay,” she said.

“There was this girl here.” I described Lucinda in detail, all the detail someone who’d spent countless hours staring at a woman would know. I left out things like her sexy pout and liquid eyes.

“Oh,” Rosa said. “You’re talking about Didi. ” But she said it in a way that made me think she hadn’t exactly liked Didi.

“Didi? Yeah . . . I think that was her name. Sure.”

“She was a fucking puta . . . a player, you know. . . .”

“No.”

“Oh yeah. She comes in and sees what’s what in like two minutes, right? Sticking her tits out . . . her skinny little ass . . . parading it for the boss. I could see what she was doing. I’m down like James Brown on this bitch, right? She’s here like two days, two fucking days, and she’s doing him.”

The boss. Raul Vasquez.

“Where is the boss?” I said.

Rosa shrugged. “Don’t know. He hasn’t been around. Why?”

“No reason.” And I thought: They don’t know. I had his wallet, and he wasn’t registered at the hotel. They had no name and no one to notify. No next of kin to break the news to.

“So, you married?” she asked me.

“No.”

I was trying to put it all together. I was trying to picture how it started. These poor wetbacks came into the Crystal Night Club to blow all their cash on hostesses who basically looked down on them. Lucinda was one of those hostesses. That faint accent I’d asked her about on the train—Spanish? But Lucinda hadn’t remained a hostess for long. She’d flashed her skinny ass instead and hooked up with Vasquez. You could see why he’d want to. She didn’t look like the rest of them here. She looked like someone who spent her day buying low and selling high in some office tower downtown. The kind of woman other white-collar commuters would drool over behind their morning papers.

Was it his idea, I wondered, or hers? Who got the idea — who looked around the depressing environs of the Crystal Night Club and saw the possibilities?

“You ain’t drinking,” Rosa said. “The rule is, if you don’t drink, I gotta talk to somebody else, okay?”

“I’ll order another,” I said, and Rosa smiled.

Maybe it was her. Didi. Maybe she saw how ridiculously easy it was to make these day laborers far from home fall in love with her and knew it would be even easier with guys like me. Married guys who weren’t far from home, but maybe were wishing they were. Guys who wanted someone to talk to just as much as these guys. Guys with real cash.

When the bartender brought over another tequila sunrise, I opened my wallet to pay.

Rosa said: “Widdoes? What kind of name is that?” She was looking at a piece of my new driver’s license. Yes, my first night as a new man. Charles Schine was dead.

“Just a name,” I said.

“It’s depressing,” she said. “Like widows, you know. . . .”

“Yes, well, it’s spelled differently.”

“That’s true,” she said seriously.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked her.

“Over there — ” She pointed to a back hall. “Most of them use the sidewalk,” she said, and snorted. “You should smell it at four in the morning. They don’t know no better.”

“Well, I’ll use the bathroom,” I said.