I'm often asked where I get my ideas, and the truth is, I don't know. It's a mysterious process that blends inspiration from the real world with a lot of "What if?" questions and a healthy dose of subconscious thinking. One thing I can tell you is that ideas pretty much never just present themselves, all dressed up and ready to dance.
This one did.
I'd promised a story to an anthology called Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll, and didn't have any idea what that story would be. When I'd agreed, the deadline had been a far off thing, hazy and undaunting, but as it does, time kept passing, and all of a sudden that deadline had grown big and ugly.
Then one perfectly average night I went to bed, and in the morning, I awoke to find I was turning a fully-formed story idea around in my head. A dirty little gem of a noir tale, and one I knew just how to tell.
The result is probably my favorite of the stories I've written. I hope you'll enjoy it too.
The Days When You Were Anything Else
She calls sometimes. Late at night, drunk or worse. She calls to say she hates me.
One time she said a guy offered her money to blow him in a bar bathroom. Then, defiant, told me she'd done it. Fifty dollars, she said. That's what she's worth.
My Jessica. My baby girl.
The last call, three months ago, all she did was cry. Not heaves and jags. Gentle sobs like rain that falls all day. She never even said who it was. I held the phone and whispered, over and over, that it would be okay. That she should come home. That I loved her and would take of her.
When she finally spoke, just before she hung up, she said that it was all my fault.
She's right.
#
After I got out of Dixon, I didn't want to be part of the game any more. It wasn't a moral decision. I wasn't trying to prove anything. It's just that hustling is like Vegas. Play long enough, you always lose. And I'd lost enough.
So I talked to some people, and I landed a job working the stick at Liar's, a dive under the Blue Line. I'd hung around there often enough anyway. It was the kind of bar where workingmen go to find someone to kick them ten percent for leaving the back door to a warehouse open. I'm not talking criminals. I'm talking honest guys with more bills and children than a nine-to-five coupled with a six-to-midnight could cover.
The criminals were the guys they talked to, guys like I used to be before I trusted the wrong person, before a job that should have set us up for six months instead sent me up for five years.
Tending is no way to get rich, especially at a dump like Liar's, but my life is pretty simple. I have a studio in Little Puerto Rico and a phone number I make damn sure stays listed. At work, I keep a Louisville Slugger behind the bar, but rarely pull it out. I know these men, even the ones I've never met. After a year or two, I struck up a few friendships, guys that hang around after I flip off the neons. We talk and drink and smoke the place blue, and if Lester White is feeling magnanimous, do a couple of bumps. It isn't quite a family, but it's what I have, and it's okay.
Sometimes, I even get to feeling good. Last week Lester was talking on his cell, chewing out the guy who runs a house he deals crank out of. He's nice enough, Lester, until he isn't. Then he's, well, not nice at all. I've heard stories about him and pit bulls, and I don't ever want to know if they're true.
When Lester hung up, I asked if everything was okay.
"Fucking kids," he said. "I don't know how many times I've told him to get a fucking security cage put on the back door. Kid thinks because they've got one on the front, they're safe, but these days." He shook his head.
He didn't finish, and I didn't ask him to. I just topped off his Glenlivet. The rest of the guys I only spot Beam. Lester nodded at me, smiled, said, "Frank, when are you going to quit this bartending shit and come work for me? Kids these days, they aren't worth a goddamn."
Like I said, sometimes I get to feeling good. Silly, maybe, but there it is. I have a job and friends and a daughter who calls every couple of months, even if only to say she hates me. And as long as she keeps calling, there's hope.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
#
He came in around three, when the bar was all but empty. A thin kid in his twenties, sporting that cocaine skeeze: long, limp hair, a complicated goatee, a mean twitchiness to the eyes. A pack of Parliaments in his left pocket. A plastic-gripped pistol barely hidden by a half-buttoned work shirt. I know his type. I've been his type.
The locket dangles from his closed fist, rocking like a hypnotist's crystal. "You know this, old man?"
Do I know it?
Till the day I die.
A lot of the stuff I gave Lucy over the years was pinched, and she was generally understanding. From the beginning, my wife knew how I made our money. But I spotted the locket in a display window one day I happened to be flush. When she saw that it came in a box, with a ribbon and everything, she hit me with that smile of hers, the one that lit me up inside. I know just what to put in it, she'd said. I'd asked, What?, as I hung it on her. Us, she'd said, and shivered when I kissed the back of her neck.