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Champagne Cocktails

David Moss

“The old man murdered her,” I tell the cops. “I should have seen it happening. I should have stopped it.”

The tall cop nods bleakly and looks away to the obscene, cherry-colored light whirling on the roof of the police car. The other cop, burly like a wrestler, unwraps a stick of chewing gum. The crinkle of the silver paper makes me jump almost as much as the gunshot I heard.

To steady myself I suck in a lung full of the filthy night air. I’m all nerves and jitters this night. There’s a 50-grand bounty out on some broad who snatched some dough from one of them billionaire oil sheiks in town from Arabia somewhere. Every hack driver in town, me included, is after that fifty G’s. Three guys I never seen before, not locals, mean looking pricks, made the rounds earlier cluing us, warning us not to help this broad. One of them flicked open a switchblade and glared at me and said to me, “You’re not stupid are you?” I shook my head. So I got to keep an eye out for that action, I sure could use $50,000, and now I have this murder heaped on me.

The sound of the cop’s voice startled me into the now.   

”You heard one shot, is that it?” the first cop says. He sounds bored. He has a big sad face like a clown mask with the corners of the thick lips turned down.

“Yes,” I mutter. “One shot.”

“Let’s see your I.D.,” says the second cop.

I show them my hack license. It tells that my name is Bobby Morrow, that I’m a 25-year-old Caucasian, 5’11”, brown hair, blue eyes, and five pounds over the light-heavyweight limit. I shuffle my feet nervously; lift my eyes to the sky where a thin trace of a cloud floats like a shredded napkin through the blackness. In another direction the lights of Las Vegas explode like nuclear bombs over the brooding desert.

“Like I said, I  been around enough. I should have stopped it,” I tell them. I wait for a response, some word or gesture to ease my rising feeling of guilt. All I get is matching scowls.

“You ever been in trouble with the law?” the burly cop says.

“Maybe.” I see right away where it’s going.

The tall cop spits on the ground. “Maybe means what?”

I flex my fingers; feel more tension tighten my shoulders. “I don’t murder people.”

“Maybe means what?” His voice has whip to it now. 

“Vice accused me – once - of being a pimp.

“And?”

”I never got charged or arrested. I drive a cab.”

In unison the cops shrug big shoulders and rush toward the house, guns drawn.

There are two kinds of higher education, college and the street. I always give myself credit for being street smart. I grew up in a tough neighborhood where every other space was a bar, where bums panhandled on every corner, where junkies shot up in a park across from my elementary school. As a teen I gravitated from street fighting to boxing golden gloves. I wanted to turn pro but I cut too easy across the eyebrows so I had to quit. After high school I went into the army. After my discharge I landed in Vegas, for now, behind the wheel of a cab, but I have bigger goals. And yeah, I know a few ladies who give me a cut of what they earn from what  they’re selling. In return I watch out for them, keep them from getting hurt. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

A night ago I pick this old guy in front of a bungalow in a housing plan a few miles off the Strip. Vegas isn’t all high-rollers and casinos. Normal people live here too.

“Just drive around,” he says. He must be over 80, stoop-shouldered and skinny with stringy wisps of white hair sprouting like thread atop a thin face. He’s wearing Bermudas, sandals, and a red Hawaiian shirt with yellow palm trees. “I can smell the liquor. “Give me $100 worth.” He reaches over and hands a quartet of crisp fifties, “Two for the ride, two for you, bucco.” He sits back and I hear a weary sigh like the swish of a door closing.

I drive him up energy-charged Las Vegas Boulevard, through the ribald flash of neon, through all that rainbow and lava pouring over the wide spectral street. A cacophony of screeching rubber and wild roaring engines quashes calm.

“Las Vegas used to be a great place,’ he laments. “When the mob ran it,” he adds. “I’m going back lots of years. It’s gaudy now, cheap, like theme park,” he says.

“If you say so,” I respond. Vegas might be gaudy but I don’t see anything cheap about it. Why argue, especially with a fare who’s dropping “C” note tips.

“Get on the other side of the road and go slow past the Flamingo,” he tells me.

I drive to Tropicana Avenue and turn around. Heading back through the malaise of darting traffic toward Fremont Street I spot a hooker I know, not one of my girls, standing on nervous legs on the sidewalk in front of the Barbary Coast. She’s a blond from Des Moines with a bad coke habit. Everybody in Vegas is from somewhere else. She spots me and waves. I think the cops will nab her for sure hustling out in the open like that. I slow down passing the Flamingo. Only a few seconds elapse.

“I’ve seen it, get going.”

I tromp the gas pedal and the cab surges. There’s a white limo riding my back fender. A broad I’m banging drives for that company. She works nights like me and during the day goes to school to be a dealer. Like a lot of people I know she has a demon to contend with, at times an unyielding urge to go into a place and take something she doesn’t need and leave without paying for it. I glimpse into the mirror to see if she’s behind the steering wheel but the face I see isn’t pretty; it isn’t hers. It’s at night when she gets in trouble. I begin to be concerned for her. My rider pulls me back.   

“Ever think about dying?”

“Never,” I’m wearing a white T with “Las Vegas” boldly imprinted in gold on the front, jeans, and sneakers. My navy blue windbreaker is on the front seat. I touch the gold lettering on the T and begin thinking about all the miles I’ve driven on this frantic slab of pavement, about all the hours I’ve spent in every one of those joy domes we pass,  not about never breathing again.

“You’re in good health, aren’t you?”

“I keep in shape.” 

“You don’t dwell on death, do you?”

“Why should I? I like it on this side of the grass.” I stop there without telling him that my life is good. I run. I hit the gym. I play golf to a seven handicap that really should be a two or three, but the seven handicap works when a sucker comes along. I have no qualms about hustling some hotshot who has an inflated opinion about who he is. People come to Las Vegas to lose money so they might as well lose some of it to me.

“Why do people hold onto life when it doesn’t matter any longer?” he demands harshly.

He’s throwing heavy punches at me and I don’t like it. Dames and sports are what mostly ring my bell. “I don’t know.”

“Then tell me this, when is dying better than living?”

“I don’t have an answer to that, but from where I sit life is always the better choice.”

Suddenly I think of some unlucky animal that some asshole caught in a steel trap. The animal keeps fighting to the end, never running out of hope. That’s the nebulous intangible, a pervading will to cling to precious life, inside all creatures from human to gnat.

“You’re a young man, you wouldn’t understand,” he says. “Take me home. I’ve seen enough.”

We veer off the Strip and away from  the cascade of lights. The frayed glitter quickly dissolves, replaced by a huge black cloak that wraps itself snugly around us. I’m glad. This is my domain, the sanctuary of night.

He gets out of the cab and says, “Come inside. Please. I want to show you someone.”

She’s on the bed, a tiny old lady, covered with a clean white blanket to her pointy chin. Her face is gaunt, sunken, shriveled like a baby  bird’s. Her ash-colored skin is thin like tissue paper and I get the unsettling feeling her skull is about to grind through. She doesn’t have any hair on her head. Her eyes are shut. She’s hardly breathing.

“She’d be better off dead,” he tells me.

I back away. The room is hot and reeks of Lysol.

“Cancer,” he says. “I nurse her because I want to or have to, I can’t figure out which. It feels like I’ve been doing it for a thousand years. Taking care of her is my reason to live.”

I roll my shoulders the way an anxious fighter does getting loose.

“There’s our wedding picture.” He points to a dresser and a black and white photo of a good-looking man in a dark tux and a pretty woman in a light colored wedding gown, both smiling, both young, both ready for the best of life to begin. They have the lyrical  look of people with dreams.

“Can’t you take her to a hospital?”

“No. The doctors can’t do anything for her. Hospice comes. Mostly it’s just me.”

I wonder if I could do it. I think of my Mother getting old back in Chicago.  My Father is dead but my sister is nearby. I wonder where I fit. I wonder how many people like this guy are out there, nursing someone, sacrificing their life for a person they love. Even though we’re in fun city everyone isn’t having a good time.

“Do you have a wife?” he asks me.

I shake my head. I don’t get into how I’m pretty good with the skirts and how I like to fool around with a lot of different sweeties. I don’t tell him I’m not ready for one  woman long term.

“We got married fifty-three years ago right here in Las Vegas,” he tells me. Some brightness creeps into his eyes as the memory takes hold. “Frank Costello was in town.  He didn’t know us from nothing but he bought us a drink. Ever hear of him? Ever hear of Frank Costello?” 

“Yeah. He ran the Mafia in the fifties.”

His voice rises excitedly. “Frank Costello was the biggest gambler and the biggest tipper who ever lived and he bought me and my bride Champagne Cocktails at the Flamingo on our wedding night.” He beams proudly. “How many people can say that?”

“Probably none.” I imagine myself tending bar in 1952 in the Flamingo. I’m wearing a white shirt, maroon vest, maroon tie, and mixing Champagne Cocktails: spiral rinds of  ½ lemon, lumps of sugar soaked in bitters, six ounce flute glasses filled with bubbly. I imagine two giddy honeymooners sitting at a table and the glowering mob boss himself, Frank Costello, telling me, “Make them drinks good, kid, they’re for special people.”

The man smiles but I don’t see mirth; I see the anguish of not wanting to let go, of knowing the grip is loosening. The woman on the bed stirs slightly and moans. It’s a pitiful eerie sound that drags me into a strange realm.

The old guy winces. “She should die.” It sounds like a wish, like a prayer.

I look hard at her and then at him. I give him kudos for being good people.  “You’re top shelf, mister,” I tell him. With feeling I pat him on the back.

“I do what I have to do but I’m out of gas,” he sobs. 

On the street I feel the desert breeze dragging with it the smell of dust and sage, and think about how uncertain our lives are. There’s something unpleasant stalking all of us but we can’t take out insurance like a player can in blackjack when the dealer shows an ace. All we can do is brace ourselves and hope we can survive the hit when it happens.

Before I get into the cab I hear the gunshot from inside the house. I stiffen from the shock. I’m not so smart after all. I should have seen that all of this was a prelude to death. I let the echo of the gunshot fade before I make the phone call.

A team from the coroner’s office brings the body out in a plastic bag.

“You had it wrong,” the gum-chewing cop informs.

The other cop says, “It’s the old guy who’s dead. The woman is still alive.”

I lean against my cab. I figured it the other way, that he killed her to end her misery. He couldn’t take it anymore. He’s still top shelf in my book, always will be. We all have limits I tell myself. Having limits doesn’t make a person bad. Again I think that at some time, in some way, we all will get tested. I peer up at the stars, at the elegiac night sky. 

“You can go, for now,” the gum-chewing cop says. His tone is ominous.

“We’ll meet again,” the other cop chimes. ”Count on it.”

“We decided that you’re not just some smuck cabbie,” gum-chewer says. “You’re bad news. In our report we’re recommending that we should get  a better read on you.”

I force a gentle grin and give them a courteous two-finger salute.

I’m too jittery for more driving but it’s only 2:30 A.M. I’m a nightcrawler; I never go to sleep until I see the lurid light of day. Besides, I have to blunt the memory of that recent hack ride on Las Vegas Boulevard and its grim aftermath.

Three blocks from the Golden Nugget downtown I enter the sour-smelling lobby of a cheapo motel. I hear scratchy sounds of country western music coming from a radio. A  pal of mine, an ex-biker, an ex-con, is the night clerk. He’s sitting behind the counter, leaning back in the chair, his head resting on a slab of the drab wall. Half-closed, dark eyes stare vacantly through a smudged window at the blue-black offal of night enveloping his world.

***

I trudge across worn brown carpet pocked with cigarette-burn holes and vomit stains,

mementoes  from the brigade of loners and losers who have traversed that floor. He stands and shoves a slice of half-eaten pepperoni pizza out of the way. We shake hands. His knuckles are hard and scarred. I see a tattoo of a red lightening bolt on the lower left side of his thick neck. He’s in short sleeves and more tattoos, green and indigo snakes and lizards, slither over his well-muscled forearms. A promise of violence, barely controllable, emanates from him. A month ago, in a squabble over a stolen SUV, my pal never fully retired, he had a “chop shop”  before he got sent up, I seen him with one punch  split a guy’s face open, a tough crazy black dude who won’t forget, who is waiting his turn for payback. I lift a pint bottle of Crown from my jacket pocket.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

I shrug. “I feel down, bro. I feel worthless, like a can of flat beer.”

So now, a night later, I’m on the Strip again, still burdened with heavy thoughts I’m not used to, with thoughts I don’t want to carry. It’s after midnight. In front of one of the big hotels I pick up a fare, a knockout brunette in high heels and a scarlet mini. She has the appearance of a supermodel.  She’s lugging a big black leather suitcase. She gets into the cab. I ogle her trim legs, inhale her fragrance. She smells delicious like citrus blossoms. I smile politely. I figure she’s heading for the airport.

“Drive me to Los Angeles,” she orders.

I do a double take gawking at her in the rear view.

“Look at me,” she pleads. I turn. Her beautiful face is tense.  “You think I’m kidding?” She flings open the suitcase. There must be a million dollars stacked inside. She starts to cry. She reaches for me with plaintive brown eyes through a thin mist of tears.

I slump down in the seat and my mind careens off into space. .

The doll in the back seat nudges my shoulder. “Did you hear what I asked you to do?”

“Say what?”

“Drive me to Los Angeles, please.”

I straighten. “How much trouble you in?”

“More than you can ever imagine.”

“Why?”

“Because some scumbag worth a billion dollars had one of his goons cut my sister because she said, “No.”

“If I help you, what’s in it for me?”

“Half of what’s in the suitcase if we get there.”

I think about that against the fifty thou bounty. Maybe she’s lying about her sister. Even if she is there’s five hundred thousand reasons not to care. And I don’t much like oil sheiks.  I start the cab. “I got to get rid of this cab and get a gun. Then we’re on our way.”

Now I realize my true self. I am a magnet for messed-up people, for people on the edge,  that is what I am.

Copyright(c) 2005 by David Moss

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