Among the Living (9 page)

Lloyd Hart was now Darren Price.

He was working alone. There wasn’t even a janitor around. Jimmy talked his way in, past the squawk box down at street level. Price had said hello, had said something quick and sharp and funny actually, hope in his voice that it was some young girls out cruising around. When Jimmy said what he wanted to talk about, Price buzzed him up, another case of
“Now it’s been years since anyone asked
. . .
”

He was still good-looking, in a game show host way, and he had a good, deep, round voice and a way of putting the sound of a warm smile in every word he said. Jimmy thought he recognized the voice from a TV commercial for headache relief, the kind where you got the idea somebody really
cared
about you and your pain. He wore a velveteen running suit, almost purple, and perfect white shoes, Capezio
dance
shoes. He rocked back and forth in a chair that didn’t squeak. His hand kept reaching for cigarettes he didn’t smoke anymore, hadn’t smoked for ten years.

“Hold on a sec,” he said and lifted the cans off of his neck and up over his ears. He leaned to the mic. The song was ending.

Half of the show’s audience were love-struck kids dedicating sappy songs to each other, to break up or to get back together or just to say to each other, and to the world and to ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, that
this
love was real and would stand the test of time. The other half was people at work, at 7-Elevens with a portable on the counter they weren’t supposed to have, people at bakeries and
tortillarias,
in emergency rooms, in factories where they chromed wheels or assembled meals for airlines, people cleaning offices, driving cabs, writing screenplays—and cops and suicide hotline answerers and dope-dealers and whores all waiting around for something to go down. There was a KISS station in town. Listeners were encouraged to call and repeat the money phrase, that they were “Kissing at Work . . .” At an hour like this, one other midweek night like this, Jimmy had heard a listener call in a request to
The Love Storm
saying he was “Storming at Work . . .”

A jingle played. A saxophone. A woman’s voice. The sound of soft, rolling, distant thunder.

It made Jimmy wish it would rain, really rain.

“Andrea is up studying, studying for her nursing finals,” Darren Price said, so close to the mic you could hear the breath going over his teeth. Jimmy felt like he wasn’t there now, that it was just Price and Andrea and . . .

“
Carmen,
she just wants you to know that she’s sorry she said what she said, sorry that it hurt you, and that she didn’t mean it. And that the whole future is ahead for you two and she doesn’t want to jeopardize that because she loves you more than anything. And she wanted to send this song out to you. She knows you’re listening, too.”

The song began, a song that didn’t seem to connect to words said that shouldn’t have been said or to “the whole future,” but the song was good and the singer sounded as if he really had been hurt somewhere along the line, had
that
in his voice the way Darren Price had a smile in his.

“I’m union. AFTRA,” Price said as he pulled off the headphones and killed the music in the monitors. “We’re all union.” It was a way of saying he made good money, more money than he made when he was under brighter lights, when people knew who he was, when he was right there in front of them at Big Daddy’s when Big Daddy’s was the place to be.

There are all kinds of deaths,
Jimmy thought.

“What was Tone Espinosa like?” he said.

Price squinted as if somebody had turned on the overhead lights. “This is about Tone?” he said.

“No,” Jimmy said. “It’s not.”

“We got along all right,” Price said. “He didn’t ever really
get
it.”

“Get what?”

“He hated it when
Saturday Night Fever
came along. That’s just an example. When it got big, he said it was over.”

Jimmy didn’t say anything.

“Does that make sense to you?” Price said, real perplexity in his voice.

“I guess I know what he meant.”

Price shook his head. “Well, I never did. He was about to get fired when he finally quit. They just ran cables downstairs and I played both rooms. I mean, I’m not glad the guy got killed or anything . . .”

The phone never stopped ringing. It was silent, just blinking lights. Price punched one button.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Hey.” It was a soft little voice, up past her bedtime. “It’s Andrea.”

“Hey.” Price looked at Jimmy.

“I just wanted to thank you for playing the song,” she said.

“Shouldn’t you be keeping the line open for . . .” Price looked at a Post-it note stuck on the mic stand. “Carmen?”

“I have call waiting,” she said, sexy.

Price was still looking at Jimmy when he said, “I hope things work out for you guys.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said.

“Not really,” he said, as a sexy threat.

“Yeah-h uh,” she said.

“I want you to call me, whatever happens,” he said. “On this line, OK?”

She said yes and he said he had to go and cut her off.

“I’m like a priest,” Price said as her light went out.

“Yeah, I was just thinking that.”

Jimmy told him who he was, what this was, a version that left out murders and executions and little girls orphaned, that almost made it sound like Elaine Kantke had lost her purse or one of her shoes like Cinderella and had hired Jimmy to get it back, all the way back from Disco ’77.

“The Jolly Girls,” Price said. He used a
slanted
intonation, like a comic. The
Jolly
Girls . . .

“So you remember them.”

“There were three of them,
four
of them. They were babes. They were all older than I was. I was, I don’t know, twenty-four. They were maybe thirty. It seemed like a real difference at the time, but they were still babes.”

“And they always came to the club with their husbands,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, right, I remember that
distinctly.
”

“Who was the leader?”

“Elaine, I guess. I don’t know. It’s all kind of a blur, if you know what I mean.”

Jimmy knew. “Did they do coke?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Jimmy had said
they
in a way that meant, “Did they do coke, too?” The DJ wasn’t insulted. Lloyd-the-Void had tried to fill the void with one of the things you try to fill the void with. Step One was to accept that you were powerless . . .

“I wouldn’t say they were the
biggest
Hoovers among the regulars,” Darren said. “But then again,
that
bar would have been pretty high at Big Daddy’s at that particular time.”

“Did you talk to her much?”

“I talked to all of the regulars. It was part of the job. But I liked doing it. I was kind of a star. I got that kind of response from people, the regulars.”

And he began to talk about the nights there.
I love the nightlife, I love to boogie.
He described each one of the lighting effects suspended above the dance floor, how they had been brought in from New York, how there weren’t any lights anywhere else in L.A. like those lights.
Turn the beat around, turn it upside down.
He remembered the wattage of the sound system, the size of the big black bass cabinets that sat on the four corners of the dance floor so it came up out of the earth at you, too, how the floor was covered in fog, like a graveyard in a cheap movie. Talking about the past, he had a different kind of energy. He woke up. He had more words at his disposal and they were better words, words that put you there.

He interrupted himself when he needed to change a record or speak some words of encouragement to the heartbroken. An hour passed while he talked and the lovesick went to bed and the requests changed. Now it was more the people at work trying to stay awake, wanting something with a little more heat and a little less hurt.

He remembered what Elaine Kantke drank because he’d buy her and the other Jolly Girls drinks to make them feel special.
Long Island iced teas.
He remembered that she wasn’t the best dancer of the four young women. That would be Michelle. Michelle would also be the biggest Hoover. Elaine would dance every once in a while, but what she really liked was being at the bar, on a stool, facing the dance floor and laughing at her friends.

He remembered Vivian Goreck, a redhead.
Viv.

He remembered Bill Danko but not by name, just remembered that for a while there was someone Elaine seemed to meet, a blocky guy with his thick torso wedged into the requisite Nik-Nik pointy-collared polyester shirts and beltless, high-waisted flared pants. He remembered his name as
Wayne
or
Dwayne,
which is what you’d think, looking at Bill Danko.

He didn’t know that Elaine Kantke was dead. DJs read
Billboard,
not the
Times.
He’d just assumed The Jolly Girls had found a new club or their husbands had finally gotten around to seeing
Saturday Night Fever
and had shortened their leashes.

“I learned two things about the bar business—and about life—when I was at Big Daddy’s,” Darren Price said.

Jimmy wondered how many times he’d said that line.

“The first thing, Big Daddy Joe Flannigan himself said to me personally. One night after we closed and we were all drinking kamikazes at the bar, he said to all of us, ‘What business are we in?’ Somebody of course said, the
booze
business, thinking that was what he wanted to hear. He had a white beard, looked kind of like Hemingway and wore these white shorts and a Kelly green shirt and he was big. Joe shook his head. Not the booze business. There were a couple more wrong guesses. He looked at me. I said, ‘The
entertainment
business.’ Big Daddy shook his head.”

Price was going to make Jimmy wait for it.

Jimmy waited for it.

“ ‘We’re in the
loneliness
business.’ Not
loneliest,
loneli
ness
. . .”

Jimmy got it. He nodded his head.

“Buying or selling?” he said.

Darren Price didn’t get it.

“What was the second thing you learned?” Jimmy said.

“Hats start fights.”

They talked another half hour. Lloyd-the-Void looked disappointed when Jimmy stood up to go.

It was almost four. The Kinko’s that occupied the space where Big Daddy’s used to be was open all night. They’d ripped off the two-story front and put in glass all the way up. It was a box of light in front of the empty parking lot. There were six or eight people in there under the ghastly bright lights, two guys behind the counter and one running the big machine that wasn’t self-serve. They probably kept the reams of paper down below in what had been the
serious
room, Tone Espinosa’s room.

They’d left the entrance the same, six steps up to what had been the main room of the club. Elaine Kantke and Bill Danko had climbed those steps, looking to do something about their loneliness, if you believed Big Daddy.

Jimmy sat on the front fender of the Porsche, the car he’d picked that morning from the line in the garage.

“Why do people need to make copies in the middle of the night?” he said, out loud, to no one. “What are they copying?”

A coughing VW bug came in, fast. A man with a belly and a colorless T-shirt the size that maybe fit him when he was twenty got out and charged in, taking two steps at a time, his fist clutching a thick sheaf of papers. There was one answer: it was open for the people up all night grinding their teeth at some grievance, consumer or governmental, assembling their cases, ready to by God
fire off
some papers in the morning.

It had been a long day. The days got longer when Jimmy was working, felt that way anyway. This story was at that early stage where everything was incomplete, sketchy, self-contradictory—and he had done this enough to know that a big part of what he was “learning” was just simply wrong.

A seagull landed on a light stanchion. Jimmy turned around and looked toward Marina Del Rey, the immense condominiums which stood over the wide channels and the hundreds of slips. The tops of the tallest masts were visible between the towers.

The light was odd, noncommittal. He wished the sun would come up, right now.

An LAPD sergeant’s cruiser pulled in beside him. The cop was alone. The window was down.

“Saint Thomas,” Jimmy said.

The patrol cars all had computer monitors hung on the dash now and a full-size keyboard where you used to put your coffee. The radio spoke, the voice female and not very friendly. You could tell the cop was a sergeant by the extra antennas on the roof.

Saint Thomas’s last name was Connor. He got out. He looked to be in his fifties, handsome in that cops and firemen way, self-assured good looks, clear eyes, skin wrinkled not from worry but from being on the boat on the lake on days off, or on the sidelines coaching kids.