The sun sets behind me as we roll onto 46th Street, past guitar stores and half a dozen Brazilian restaurants and bars that make this single block into “Little Brazil.” Routing through my bag, through clothes, makeup, shoes and everything else I drag around everyday, I find my last softly crumpled fiver and hand it to the Paki cabbie. It’s always my last fiver as I roll into work. Doesn’t matter if I worked last night or I’m at the tail end of a five day run. Either way, the cabbie gets the last bill. But, as long as I have enough to get to work, it’s all good.
I pull open the heavy glass door to the hallway. Directly ahead of me, stairs lead to a cute little apartment with a two sets of French doors– one separating the living room and bedroom, the other leading out to the tiny terrace overlooking the Church of St. Mary the Virgin across the street, and Myron’s newest bar, the Lollipop Lounge, below. It’s very sweet and very French and Myron’s been trying to talk me into renting it. I’d save on cab fare, he says. But I’d one flight up from the bar, I think. No more screening calls or calling in ‘home in bed with the flu’ when I’m really home in bed with Mr. Just Got Home from Prison or Mr. On His Way to the Crazyhouse. They’d be knocking on my door all day and night to use the phone or the bed, for a quickie or to crash, using the whole place for making deals, cutting things up. I’d be the goddamned back room.
Nope. I pass. Not even for French doors. Not even for two sets of them.
I ignore the stairs, turning left and pushing open the door to the Lollipop.
I’d expected music loud enough to drown your sorrows, rumbling out of the old style jukebox. But there’s only some general mumbling and subdued laughter, clinking of glasses and ice, shuffling of bar stools and feet. The mediocrity of real life normally drowned out by blaring and repetitive disco beats.
“What the fuck…,” the carpet crunches as I step inside. “Jeez Louise.”
“Nice, right?” Piper laughs, leaning against a train wreck of multicolored plastic rubble and mechanical gizmos. She takes a drag of her Newport and pats what’s left of the jukebox with a perfectly manicured hand. Lights limp and sputter sporadically–yellow, red, blue, and glaring white through the broken plastic. Cracked 45’s and colored shards of thick plastic litter the floor.
It’s bad.
Myron loved his jukebox; I’m genuinely surprised he let this happen. Last time they’d all jumped to her defense, as if she were some fragile Southern belle. It was a sticky summer night in Times Square, one of those nights so hot the garbage starts cooking up into a stink stew. A muscle bound base-head wandered in, his eyes spinning, his body slick with sweat. He wasn’t interested in drinking, or naked women. But he fell in love with the flashing lights of that jukebox. He stood over her, watching her lights flicker and dance, for 20 minutes.
Maybe he was there an hour, I wasn’t paying too much attention. But I remember his arms, thick and strong, and the way he gripped each side of the jukebox firmly, the way you do a woman’s hips when you’re taking her from behind. He had a beautiful prison body, that perfection you get from lots of free time in the yard. After a while, I guess the flashing lights flipped a switch in his brain-stem. He leaned back, still clutching the box. Pushing his pelvis against the jukebox and dropping his head back, he let loose with a howl. It was primitive, boy oh boy, something that came from the very bottom of his beat-up Chuck Taylors. He howled again, curled back in toward the box and proceeded to lift it straight up, every muscle straining. I watched from the bar, waiting for the muscles of his arms to just…pop.
Big Maxie grabbed the wooden baseball bat from behind the bar and walked over slowly, dangling it out of sight just behind his thick leg. He stood with the bat swinging softly behind him like a metronome and talked the kid down, talked him into putting the jukebox tenderly back down on the floor. I know it’s easy to be calm when you’re holding a baseball bat, but if that kid could lift a full size jukebox straight up, there’s no telling what damage he could do to a man, even a bulldog like Big Max. But the basehead put the box down, and him and Maxie talked, drank and smoked a little while Myron sat at the bar, still shelling pistachio nuts and popping them one at a time into his mouth. His eyes’d never left his prized possession as Maxie talked the kid down and you could tell, he’d sit there and watch just the same if Maxie had to bash the kids head open to get him to put the jukebox back down. Myron watched, shelled and popped until the kid was gone, and that’s all that was worth remembering of that night.
So I wondered, what the hell could have happened here? The box was a goner; there was no repairing it, nothing worth saving except maybe a shard of blue plastic for sentimental reasons. It looked like it had been at the bad end of real old-fashioned beat down.
“What the fuck, Pipes?”
“Chief shot it,” she says. I look at her; she shrugs her shoulders and laughs. “I don’t know JJ, he was sitting at the end of the bar same as always, whispering his crazy Chief shit, then he pulls out a pistol and shoots the thing. Bang. Bang. Bang. Three times.” She takes another drag off the Newport. “He said it made a threatening move at ‘im.”
Chief is crazy, but not so’s you could tell by looking at him. Tall and balding, with a dark bushy mustache and glasses, he looks like an accountant. An annoying accountant, but still, he looked harmless. Chief’s brand of crazy was the kind you’d never see coming.
“Piper…?” I turn and hold my hands out, ala Carol Merrill on ‘Let’s Make a Deal’. This was more than three bullets worth of damage.
“Well, Myron & Max were outside, they come running in. Max looks at the box, looks up at Chief, looks at the box, then back at Chief again. Chief’s still standing there with the gun in his hand, he looks at them and says,” Piper starts to giggle, slightly insanely, “JJ, he looks at them and says, ‘It made a threatening move’. Max comes over to the bar, all pissed off, you know how he is, and grabs the bat. ‘It made a move on ya?’ he says. ‘Yeah, it made a move Maxie, I hadda do it, it made a move,’ Chief says. So, they all went after it. They took turns with the bat, Little Maxie’s in there with a car jack. I don’t know where the crowbar came from. Max, Chief, little Max, even Myron. Everybody. Hadda be done I guess – after all JJ,” she shrugs and starts to walk away, “it made the first move.” She laughs, heading behind the bar.
“Shit, I miss all the good stuff,…”
“That’s what you get for going home, J…”
“I’m thinking maybe I move upstairs.” I shake my head. I love this job. You never know what’s going to happen. I mean, really, everyone knows Chief is dangerous, so who’d expect a single unarmed jukebox would be the one that would try and take him out.
I scoot up onto the bar stool next to Chief for my standard pre-shift double Vodka, with just enough Seven-Up for bubbles. I’ll drink through the whole night, but I like one to start the night out right, for luck. The boys are all busy talking, rehashing the fight, who did what to the box, how it got what it deserved, and on and on. Chief leans over. He smells warm, of scotch and cigarettes, his lips soft to my ear, his mustache rough against the curve of my earlobe, “Tickle your ass with a feather,” he whispers.
“What? Say what, Chief?” I turn to my friend, this crazy man, this jukebox killer, and smile.
“I said, ‘How’s the weather?’” He signals for Piper to top off my drink.
The jukebox never should’ve made the first move.
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Posted December 31, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, Lollipop Lounge, partners in crime, Times Square. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.
