One Big Joke Read online

  He answered on the third ring. His hello sounded a little rushed or harried, which unsettled her but not to the point of undoing her resolve. Without hesitation or greeting, she said, “So a rabbi, a horse, and a midget walk into a bar…”

  He said, “Marsha? Is this you? Your voice is kind of slurry.”

  “…And the bartender, who’s Polish, says—”

  “Are you drunk, Marsha?”

  “No, wait. It’s the midget who’s Polish—”

  “You sound pretty drunk. Are you schnockered?”

  She hesitated then said, “A little. I guess.” Quite suddenly, her great idea no longer seemed so great and her voice got small and sheepish. “I wanted to tell you a joke.”

  “That’s nice. That’s really nice. But listen, I don’t have time for jokes right now.”

  “But you love jokes. You always have time for jokes.”

  “Not at the moment. Things have gotten kind of serious down here.”

  The unexpected word sobered her up a bit, but it also confused her and her answer came a fraction after the beat. “Serious? Did you say serious? When I’m finally trying to be funny?”

  “Ricky Reed’s down here. Someone wants to kill him.”

  The news came totally out of nowhere and would have been utterly bewildering even without the wine. She just said, “What?”

  “His new girlfriend’s old boyfriend.”

  “New…girlfriend’s…old…boyfriend,” she repeated, enunciating carefully as she tried to follow the convoluted phrase.

  “He’s Mafia.”

  “Mafia? Are you serious?”

  “I just said I was. But listen, Marsha, I gotta go. I’m picking them up at their hotel.”

  “Picking who up? The Mafia?”

  “Ricky. Ricky and the new girlfriend.”

  “You just said someone wants to kill him. I don’t think you should pick him up.”

  “It’s okay, Marsha. The guy’s in New York. But in the meantime, me and Pat, we have to help Ricky figure out a way to stay alive.”

  “Maybe that’s more Ricky’s problem.”

  “It’s our problem too. Lots of reasons. He’s a good guy. Little fucked up but means well. Can’t not help. Plus, if we get things straightened out, maybe there’s even still a chance of doing the show.”

  “Who cares about the show? Lenny, this is Mafia, people getting killed maybe.”

  “I’d have work again. Maybe make a lot of money.”

  “I don’t care about the money. I care about you. Please, Lenny, you be very careful. I love you.”

  She hadn’t expected to say those last three words. She was surprised when they popped out. Not as surprised as he was. He said, “You do?”

  “Yeah, I do. Of course I do.”

  “I didn’t know. I’d stopped believing it.”

  “You’re stupid then. I’ve been stupid, too. I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay, I know you have to go. Call me when you can. But you be careful. Promise?”

  18

  Shortly before nine p.m., standing under the porte cochere of the Flagler House hotel, Carmine was saying, “I don’t care. I’m not riding in one of those things.”

  Peppers said, “Come on, loosen up a little. Besides, we’ll be late otherwise. There’s no taxis right now. Bert said don’t even think about tryin’ to park down there. We gotta grab a Pedi-Cab.”

  He gestured toward one of the odd little vehicles that was queued up just a few feet away at the curb.

  Carmine said, “Not doin’ it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s pink. And it’s got this little fringe or some shit all around it. And I don’t wanna sit behind some gay guy’s ass pumping up and down.”

  “You don’t have to look.”

  “How do I not look? Guy’d practically be sitting on my face.”

  Peppers glanced at his watch. “Listen, we’re representin’ Lou. This guy Bert’s doin’ us a favor. It’s not right we’d be late.”

  He raised a hand to hail the Pedi-Cab. Carmine had no choice but to go along. The driver’s name was Danny. He wore a purple leotard and had legs like a ballet dancer. His buttocks were dimpled where the muscles gave place to the hollows of the hip and it was pretty clear he was wearing a thong. Peppers told him their destination and he said in a friendly voice, “Ah, I don’t often bring visitors over there. You gentlemen must be comedy buffs.”

  Carmine didn’t quite understand the comment but he was unhappy with the whole situation and ready to take offense. “Why? We look funny to you?”

  Danny thought that was really pretty clever, and he laughed as he pedaled, his sculpted thighs rising up and dipping down like breaching dolphins. “Nice,” he said. “Quick. You mostly like stand-up?”

  “Standing up, laying down, in a sling, trapeze. Whatever.”

  Danny laughed at that, too. It wasn’t just that he worked for tips and tried to be agreeable. He was genuinely amused by this guy’s impression of a New York tough guy; he had the accent down, the gruffness. “Think you’ll get up onstage? I mean, you seem like a natural.”

  Carmine said, “You fucking crazy?”

  “Don’t be shy,” coaxed Danny. “It’s just Key West. I bet you’d get a ton of laughs up there.”

  “Watch yourself, buddy.”

  This last didn’t sound too friendly, though Danny had to admire the way his passenger stayed in character. He pedaled the rest of the way in silence.

  

  Bert, not having a whole lot else to do, had arrived early and was sitting at the mostly empty bar. Pat had made him an Old-Fashioned, which he ordered mainly so he could feed the alcoholic cherry to the dog. Nursing his drink, he watched the proprietress go about her preparations for the rush that probably would never come. Tonight she seemed a bit distracted, a little sluggish maybe, and he asked if she was okay.

  “Hm? Yeah…fine. Just seem to have a lot on my mind all of a sudden.”

  “Anything ya wanna talk about?”

  “Thanks, Bert…But no.” She’d hesitated an instant because in fact she would have loved to ask the old man’s advice about how seriously a friend of hers should take a death threat from a jealous lover who was in the Mafia. Problem was, she couldn’t really ask that without presuming that Bert was Mafia too, and while he’d dropped occasional hints in that direction, he’d never come right out and admitted it. Pat was still trying to think of a tactful way to broach the subject, when the club’s door swung open and two strangers walked in.

  She quickly sized them up: Out-of-towners who probably thought they were perfectly dressed for an evening out in Florida, except their idea of Florida came from a TV show set in South Beach in the 1980s. They wore shiny shirts, open at the neck and halfway down the chest; chains, of course; snug pants that bound them in the crotch. One of them looked like an old-school muscle-man, not really cut like a modern gym-rat but with lots of beef. The other was thin and sort of concave, like you could draw a pretty smooth crescent from the top of his forehead all the way to the tips of his pointy shoes. The newcomers looked around until their eyes met Bert’s. The old man shifted his dog, then, trying to hide the effort it cost him, got up slowly from his barstool to greet them.

  Pat stood a discreet distance away while the men shook hands. They mostly talked out of the sides of their mouths and she became a notch more certain that Bert was in the Mob.

  The newcomers ordered shots and beers. When she delivered them, the beefy guy gave her something like a wink, then jerked a huge thumb toward the bare and as yet unlit stage and said, “So, hon, where’s the pole?”

  “Pole?”

  “I mean, ya know, a set, some props, stuff like that.”

  “Not our style,” Pat said. “Here, what you see is what you get. Our performers are pretty much naked up there.”

  “Best news I had all day,” said the beefy guy.

  The concave one said, “Maybe it’s b
etter we move to a table.”

  

  “Her too?” said Lenny. “You’re making her wear a disguise too?”

  “Can’t be too careful,” Ricky said.

  “Besides,” said Carla, “it’s kind of fun. Incognito. Sexy word, right? Besides, when did I ever get to go anywhere in costume? Halloween when I was a little kid. Cheap store-bought skeleton or polyester princess with a cardboard magic wand. This is, like, professional.”

  Lenny couldn’t disagree with that. The disguise was so good that he’d walked right past Carla when he’d first stepped into the Harbor House’s lobby to pick them up. Her usually unruly raven hair had been carefully tucked under a reddish wig teased into the kind of lacy but immobile pouf that was standard issue from suburban beauty parlors everywhere. The drama of her wide-set eyes was muted by a dorky pair of glasses with upswept plastic frames, and an inflatable ring around her midriff made her look thirty pounds heavier than she really was. A shapeless dress in a floral pattern completed the outfit and paired perfectly with Ricky’s elastic-waist pants, loud plaid sports jacket, narrow moustache, and oily-looking toupee. Together, they looked like a completely forgettable couple playing hooky from a cruise ship or people you might have dinner with, but only once, if you met them on a package bus tour.

  With Lenny leading the way, they stepped out into the balmy and electric Key West evening. The air smelled like oyster shells and people out on dates. From the bars of Duval Street, just a block away, came roughly blended sounds of amped music and a swell of rather manic laughter. Scooter horns beeped here and there, red and green flashes from the harbor buoys skimmed across the water. Carla said, “It’s so nice out, so alive. Can we walk?”

  “Kind of far,” said Lenny. “Getting kind of late. I think we ought to grab a cab.”

  Rather than complain, Carla looked for a compromise. “Open-air, at least? Maybe one of those rickshaw kind of things?”

  After strolling half a block they came across a pedi-cab. Its driver had gorgeous legs squeezed into a purple leotard. Lenny gave him the destination and he said, “Wow, you guys are the second fare I’ve brought over there in the last fifteen, twenty minutes. Last guys were pretty funny, I thought maybe they were warming up an act. Had this kind of deadpan wiseguy shtick going on.”

  “Sounds like a regular riot,” Ricky said.

  “Two trips there in an hour,” mused the driver as he pedaled off toward Garrison Bight. “Maybe that place is finally catching on.”

  19

  The first performer of the evening was a lesbian comedian with ear grommets and blue hair and whose routine was largely built around the elaborate and ever-escalating excuses she’d had to make to her super-straight and clueless parents back in Iowa for why she wasn’t going to the junior prom, the senior prom, the homecoming prom, or the Debutante Ball at the local Grange. She’d claimed tonsillitis, appendicitis, tendinitis, meningitis, vaginitis, diverticulitis, a touch of plague, a hint of bird flu, and needing to stay home and study for a big Home Ec exam for which she had to memorize fifteen different pork chop recipes.

  She was five minutes into her set before Carmine finally understood that she wasn’t going to take her clothes off. He got even by not laughing at her jokes.

  Between acts, the three men chatted. Carmine thought Peppers was trying a little too hard to ingratiate himself with Bert, saying how cute his dog was and how Bert was still a living legend in New York. Even Carmine could see that the old man was bored by the compliments and wanted to talk about other things. He kept trying to work the conversation around to details of Fat Lou’s business that they were not supposed to talk about.

  “So,” he said, “sounds like Lou’s got himself a partner down here, well-connected local guy.”

  “Yup,” said Carmine, and pressed his teeth together.

  “Neglected to mention his name, though.”

  “Due respect,” said Peppers, “I don’t think it was neglect. The name, he wants to keep it under wraps for now.”

  “Even from me?” the old man said, his curiosity beginning to gnaw like heartburn.

  Peppers just offered a deferential shrug.

  “Well, okay, I get it. Delicate business, dealing with a local partner. So much based on trust. Then again, the local partner has a built-in edge, namely local knowledge. Which can become a problem if this partner is not the type to play completely fair or divvy up risks and rewards exactly fifty-fifty. If I was Lou, I’d want some local knowledge about the partner wit’ the local knowledge. Capeesh?”

  Peppers said, “Yeah, capeesh, but Lou seems to have a pretty good sense a the guy.”

  Undeterred, Bert said, “And I have a pretty good sense a the Pope, but it ain’t the same like I live right there in the Vatican. But okay, whatever. I’m just offerin’ ta help. Save you guys some trouble. Spare ya, maybe, from, ya know, screwin’ up big time and havin’ Lou get all upset with ya even though the screw-up wouldn’t really be your fault, it would just be that you lacked for local information that no one could really have expected you to have unless you received it directly from the mouth of a bona fide local who lived here forty years. But okay, if Lou prefers to keep it a secret even from an old friend and ally, I’m sure he has his reasons, and, like I say, if the whole thing turns to shit because of a lack of understanding about who you’re dealin’ with, then I don’t see where you guys could really get the blame. Salud.”

  He raised what was left of his now-watery cocktail, took a sip, petted his dog, and waited.

  He casually watched as Carmine and Peppers consulted with their eyes, and he could read in their wavering expressions the mild but unceasing anguish of underlings just trying to stay out of trouble. Peppers licked his lips. Carmine’s mouth twitched at the corner. Bert had the feeling they were just about to spill, but at that moment another comedian stepped onto the stage. Out of politeness, Bert joined in the modest applause and shifted his attention. He thought he’d made a pretty good start at wearing these guys down.

  This next comedian was a scrawny guy whose Adam’s apple protruded like a knuckle and who looked completely stoned. He futzed around with the microphone for a few seconds then started talking about a dream he’d had a few nights before, in which he was playing ping-pong with Donald Trump.

  He was still working on the set-up of the story when the club’s door opened and three new, entirely unremarkable people stepped in: A very average-looking guy with a pronounced forward lean to his posture, and a dowdy couple who looked like they’d purchased their resort-wear from a struggling outlet center in the Upper Midwest. Not wanting to disrupt the performance, they stepped very quietly to one side of the room and sat down at a vacant table.

  20

  The comedian was saying, “So Trump pulls out this enormous gold paddle and says, ‘This one’s mine. You, you loser, you have to play with a shoe.’”

  The newcomers settled in, shifted their chairs as silently as they could, tried to pick up the thread of the story.

  “So Trump serves the ball. It goes into the net. I say, ‘My point.’ He says, ‘No it isn’t.’ I say, ‘Yeah it is. You served into the net.’ He says, ‘No. You served into the net!’ I say, ‘Look where the ball is. It’s on your side of the table.’ He says, ‘No it isn’t. It’s on your side. One-nothing mine.’”

  The comedian paused for effect. During the brief silence, the new arrivals glanced around the room, appraising the very modest turnout. Suddenly Carla dug her long red fingernails into Ricky’s forearm. He felt their bite even through the fabric of the plaid sports jacket and shot her a look. She tried hard to keep her whisper from sounding frantic. “Don’t move. Don’t turn. But, Jesus Christ, it’s him! He’s here!”

  “Next point, we hit a couple back and forth, him with the giant gold paddle, me with the shoe…”

  “Who?” said Ricky. “Who’s here?”

  With her eyes alone, Carla pointed to Carmine, who mostly had his back to them but with
enough of his bulk and broke-nosed profile showing that there could be no doubt. Her companions tracked the look.

  Ricky hissed, “Shit! Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Then Trump winds up, gets his fat stomach right up against the table, kind of hanging over the table, really, a little bit disgusting, and tries this ginormous smash…”

  Rocking forward in his chair, Ricky said, “We gotta get out of here. Right now.”

  Lenny, to his own surprise, felt relatively calm and clear. “No. No sudden movements. Nothing that would draw attention.”

  “…that misses the table, misses everything, not even close. Being a nice guy, I say, ‘Nice try.’ He says, ‘Nice try, my ass. That was a great shot I hit. Two for me.’”

  Ricky’s voice got glassy. “I can’t just stay here. My skin’s crawling. I’m gonna panic.”

  Carla stroked his hand. She kept one eye on Carmine’s broad and hulking back. He was sitting stone-faced, not laughing.

  Lenny whispered, “You’re fine, Ricky. Disguise is great. Trust it. What we’re gonna do for now, we’re gonna sit a while like everything is hunky-dory. No freak-outs, no flying bolts.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not the vendetta guy.”

  “So then Trump says, ‘Okay, loser, you try serving one.’ So I serve one, with the shoe. It’s got some spin on it and it goes right by him. He says, ‘Do over. I wasn’t ready.’ I say, “Weren’t ready? You just told me to serve. Now you weren’t ready?’ He says, ‘Wasn’t ready. Doesn’t count.’”

  “We’re gonna sit,” Lenny resumed, “till there’s a natural time to leave, then we’re gonna slip out quietly, no rush, no hurry, nothing to make heads turn.”

  So they sat. Ricky took shallow breaths and tried to will away the cold and itchy sweat that he felt forming at his hairline, under the toupee. The routine about the ping-pong game continued. Trump claimed every point even if he missed the table, threw his paddle, got pissed off and stomped the ball flat, even if his pants fell down in the middle of a rally. The performer’s tempo got crisper as the story’s momentum built, as its imagery grew more grotesque but also more magically present before the audience’s eyes, and the laughs started coming easier, thicker, carrying over from line to line.