THE BRO-MAGNET (10 page)

“I remember reading something about that,” Monte Carlo says. “What a mess.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Naturally, some instances resulted in criminal charges. Residents of Kansas couldn’t be prosecuted for abandoning their teenagers until the loophole was closed. But say if for some insane reason someone decided to live in Florida and that same person tried to abandon their child in Kansas? The parent would have relied on the Kansas law, obviously, but Florida would have rightly relied on its law prohibiting such abandonment.”

“ ‘If for some insane reason someone decided to live in Florida’?” JJ Trey echoes. “What do you have against Florida?”

I shrug. “General principle.”

“I love this guy!” Monte Carlo says. “We could use someone like him at the firm in Jersey.” He punches me fraternally on the shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you go back to school and get your law degree? You’d be terrific at it.”

“Because I’m in paint,” I say. “It never lets you down.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Steve says like a proud father. “Johnny’s great!” And now he’s not modulating his voice at all as he crows, “Like I said, he’s the guy who gave me the idea of how to get my burglary client off!”

And now Blue-Green Eyes is giving me the hairy eyeball something fierce, but I’m not bothered by it so much anymore because I’m generally used to women giving me the hairy eyeball, plus I’m finally in my element. I’m at the ballpark, even if it’s the Yankees, and I’m surrounded by guys who think I’m wonderful, even if I don’t dress like they do or if I make my vastly smaller fortune at something they consider to be an inferior job.

“Paint, it never let’s you down,” JJ Trey echoes. “Geez, I’d love to work at a job I could say that about.”

Yes, I’m finally in my element – it’s amazing how hard the guys laugh when JJ Trey complains about the vintage car he paid one hundred thousand dollars for that his mechanic can’t fix and I tell him exactly how to fix it because I owned one once only mine was a thirty-year-old rust bucket I paid fifty dollars for, keeping it on the road with rubber bands and duct tape – and now I’m finally into the game too, actually watching the field, actually noting the Yankees are up, actually noting A-Rod at the plate as he tips one back and…

Omigod. The ball is coming my way, sort of; I’ve caught balls in the cheap seats before, but I’ve never been so close to a ball when it meets the bat, ricocheting off in my general direction, so of course I do what any red-blooded male would do. Even if it is a Yankee baseball, I leap from my seat, arm fully extended, hand out to make the catch as I stumble past Rumpled Suit and trip right into the lap of Blue-Green Eyes, knocking whatever fruity drink she’s holding all over the both of us.

“Excuse me,” she says, and I’m thinking there’s that politeness again, only this time there’s no accompanying polite smile. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Trying to catch the foul tip?” I wince out my ask-answer.

“You can’t do that in these seats,” she says matter-of-factly.

At first I’m thinking she means that that’s not
done
in these seats, that the people who occupy these way-too-expensive eight-hundred-dollar seats are way too high brow to do something so mundane, so lower class as to try to shag a foul tip. And I’m about to let rip on her with a piece of my mind about such elitist bullshit when I see her hand come over my shoulder to point straight ahead of the two of us.

“See that thing?” she says, and now I see exactly what she’s pointing at. “It’s called a protective barrier.”

And of course I see it, of course there’s a protective barrier there, to protect people who are lucky enough to sit behind home plate from getting concussions from being so close to all those foul balls.

“They put that there for a reason,” she says.

Christ, I feel like an idiot. But up close like this? Those eyes are bluer, greener, and so damn intelligent. I’m a sucker for an intelligent woman.

“Geez, I hate the Yankees,” I say.

She surprises me by answering, surprise in her voice, “Me too. I can’t stand them.”

And I’m thinking how cool this is – we both hate the Yankees! But I’m also thinking: Then why is she here? And then I’m answering myself: Oh, right. Undoubtedly she hates all sports and is only here, like almost everyone else, because they get free corporate tickets, which gives them an excuse to take the afternoon off work.

Still, we have something in common – we both hate the Yankees! It’s been a long time since I had anything in common with a woman, unless we’re talking about Sam. And then I think about how she smiled at me earlier and before I can second-guess myself I blurt out with:

“You wanna go out with me sometime?”

“No.”

“Are you married?” I ask, in a way hoping she is; at least that would explain the instantaneous no, although I don’t recall seeing any rings on her fingers.

“No, but I’m not crazy either,” she says. “And I don’t go out with guys who are responsible for helping criminals run free. Now if you wouldn’t mind…” She gives me a meaningful look and I feel myself blush as it strikes me with full-force that I’m still sitting in her lap.

I make my way back to my seat, wondering what she meant about the part about not going out with guys who are responsible for helping criminals run free.

As I sit there, my shirt now sticky from her spilled drink, Steve leans across me and acknowledges Blue-Green Eyes with a nod of the head. “Helen,” he says.

“Steve,” she acknowledges in return, her single word as grudging as grudging could be.

Something about those one-word acknowledgments – it reminds me of a cartoon I used to see when I was a kid. This wolf and this sheepdog. They’d walk to a field together at dawn, lunch pails in hand, acknowledge each other with a one-word greeting – something along the lines of, “Joe”; “Scott” – and punch a time clock. Then the wolf would spend the day trying to steal the sheep while the sheepdog would spend the day outsmarting the wolf. At the end of the day, at dusk, after a day of fighting, they’d punch out and acknowledge, “Joe”; “Scott” like what had just happened had happened but also somehow as though it had not.

That’s what Steve and Helen remind me of: the sheepdog and the wolf.

“You know her?” I say to Steve, impressed that my too-often-drunk customer knows such a woman.

“Of course,” he says. “That’s Helen. Helen Troy.”

And everything in the world, or at least a lot that’s happened today, makes perfect sense when he adds:

“She’s the District Attorney.”

I answer the phone. “Hello?”

“I’m calling about the 2006 Toyota. Is it done yet?”

“Oh, right, the Toyota. Yeah, it should be ready for pickup in the morning. We had to put a new engine in.”

“
A new engine
?” the voice on the other end goes apoplectic on me. “But I only brought it in for an oil change!”

I hang up to the sound of Sam laughing, which is good. Sam hasn’t laughed in a while.

“That never gets old,” she says, “no matter how many times I hear it.”

Steve Miller looks confused. “You just told someone you put a new engine in their car?”

“Right,” I say, “but he says he only brought it in for an oil change.”

“But you don’t even do car repairs.” He looks more puzzled still. “Do you?”

“No, but Snappy Oil Change and Auto Repairs does and their phone number is only one digit different than mine. I get wrong numbers all the time. What can I say?” I shrug. “It gets boring answering wrong numbers every day. Every now and then I need to spice things up.”

“So you tell some poor schmuck that only brought his car in for an oil change that you replaced his whole engine?”

I shrug again. “He’ll figure it out in the morning when he goes to Snappy and his car’s all fine, still with the same engine and with no big bill.”

“That’s cruel.”

“Or hysterical. All depends on your perspective.”

Steve starts to laugh. “That is pretty funny.”

“Exactly,” Sam says. “That’s what I was saying.”

“Whose turn is it to deal?” Big John says.

It’s five o’clock on Friday afternoon, officially rendering our Weekly Friday Night Poker Night our Weekly Friday Afternoon Poker Night, which is why I’m still fielding calls for Snappy. We used to start our games at a more civilized hour, like seven or eight, but since both Billy and Drew are married now, and neither of their wives like them to be out too late…

Yup. Our games begin at five now. Christ, it’s even still light out. I mean like,
really
light.

Well, it is when they arrive, but we don’t see the light where we play, which is in my basement. It’s not so easy for Big John to get down the stairs, what with the MS and all, but on good days he’ll use his cane, and on bad ones me and one of the other guys will carry him. He says it’s worth it. He loves watching Sam play, loves that she’s my friend.

“In the old days when I was growing up,” he likes to say, “we never heard of such a thing. But you kids these days? You’ve got everything. Computers. Cell phones. Lesbian best friends. You got it made.”

If I’m lucky, he doesn’t say it within Sam’s hearing. She gets very sensitive about being regarded as just another technological advance.

We’ve been meeting like this in my basement every Friday night for years – Billy, Drew, Big John, Sam, me – only tonight we added Steve Miller to the mix. Well, I added him. I don’t know how it happened. Honest to God! One minute, I was thanking him for giving me that free ticket to see a team I’m wholly uninterested in play a game I was wholly uninterested in, during which I managed to completely humiliate myself in front of a woman I found to be intriguing, and the next minute he’s casually asking me what I have planned for Friday night, I casually tell him about the poker game, he sincerely states how he’d give his right nut to have a guys’ night out of poker just once, and before I know what’s happening I find myself saying, “Hey, why don’t you come by?”

And now he’s here! In my basement! Am I ever going to be able to get rid of this guy?

Sam arrived a little before the others, like she always does, in order to help me set things up. She helped me put the snacks out – my favorite snack, the one I like to call Chips In A Bowl; it’s a very delicate operation, transferring the chips from the bag – and make sure the fridge in the basement was stocked with beer. She also helped me cover the pool table with the large sheet of plywood we always use for our Friday games, setting the chairs up around one end because whenever we try to use the whole table, it gets kind of hard to deal the cards all the way across. It was while we were moving the wood together that she told me about Renee.

“Yup, she finally moved out.”

“I kind of figured when I saw the moving van and all. Your idea?”

“Hers. She says I don’t know how to be in a relationship.”
“You OK?”

“Yes and no. Yes, because I think I’ve known all along that Renee wasn’t The One. But no, because I’m tired of things never working out. What do women want?”

She was asking the wrong guy.

“I really like the way you’ve got this place set up,” Steve says, taking in all my framed sports posters, the chandelier over the table with each light a hula girl, the painting of the dogs playing poker. He was particularly tickled when we told him we were playing over a pool table. “I should do something like this at my place.”

“You think your wife would like that?” I ask, dealing the cards. It’s kind of tough picturing Katie Miller, who has her Royal Doulton displayed in a ten-thousand-dollar breakfront, having a true appreciation for the dogs-playing-poker picture.

“That is always the question, isn’t it?” He sighs. “Probably not.”

I study my cards. Not a bad hand I’ve dealt myself. Three queens and I swear one of them’s winking at me. If only that queen were a real woman. That wink’d never happen in real life.

Sam, seated to my left, tosses one card down. Shit. She thinks she only needs one card?

“Give me – ” she starts to say, but she never gets to finish because just then someone’s cell goes off.

“Christ,” Big John says. “I thought we made a rule about this.”

Billy, Drew, Steve – they all color slightly as hands go into pockets, searching for phones.

“Sorry,” Steve says, locating his phone, realizing it’s not him. “I didn’t know there was a rule.”

“Could be Alice,” Billy says.

“You are so pussy-whipped,” Sam mocks him.

“Oh yeah?” Billy says. “Well, you wish you were.”

I shake my head at my best friends. Always with the petty jealousy.

“Nope,” Billy says, “it’s not mine.”

“It’s Stacy,” Drew says. “I gotta get this.”

Geez, I wish a wife were calling me.

As Drew fumbles his phone open, he drops his cards on the table and now everyone can see his hand.

“Christ,” Big John says, throwing his own hand down. “Why do we even bother playing?”

“Hello?” Drew says, shushing us. We can only hear his side of the conversation clearly, but whenever Stacy speaks on her end, we hear a “Waawaawaawaa” sound, kind of like the teachers’ and parents’ voices in those old Charlie Brown cartoons.

Drew: “No, it’s not nearly done yet. I just got here. Well, a half hour ago.”

Drew: “No, I won’t drink too much.”

Drew: “Yes, I’ll remember to eat something. I’ll eat something right now.”

He crams a few chips in his mouth.

Drew (slightly garbled): “A quart of milk, a pound of angel-hair pasta and a leek. Leeks – are they the really skinny green onions or that big huge thing?”

Drew (less garbled): “Right.”

Drew (whispering now, like maybe we won’t hear him – we’re right there): “I love you too, babe.”

Drew: “Right, not too late, gotta go, I’m holding up the game, no, yes, I love you too, yes, leeks, no, bye, love you.”

When Drew snaps his cell shut, he looks exhausted, like he’s just run a marathon.

“Man,” Billy says sympathetically, “you barely got out of there alive. I know what it’s like.”

“Tell me about it,” Drew says with a heavy sigh. “Women. What is it they want?”