Saturday Night V
by Joel Deutsch
Try as he might, Jojo couldn’t figure out how to get quite all of himself hidden behind the big concrete planter, one of two that the storefront Orthodox synagogue had positioned in front of it a few years before as deterrents to truck bombings. Not that they really expected that kind of trouble to fall upon them, god forbid, but who was to say? Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Paris, Jerusalem, the white supremacist fanatic who shot up the Granada Hills Jewish Center a few years before, just over in the San Fernando Valley. In every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand, they recited every Passover. And so, no disrespect to the Almighty, the heavy, hulking planters. Better safe than sorry.
Jojo wasn’t a tall man; his height, last time he remembered being measured, was a fraction short of 5‘/7”. But if he positioned his head where nobody walking by could see it, then he could feel his feet sticking out at the other end, and that was just asking for trouble. Out of sight, out of mind was what you aimed for if you slept in public spaces.
Of course they couldn’t actually see his feet, which were wrapped up like the rest of him in a stained floral print polyester fill comforter he had fished out of a dumpster once, behind a nursing home over on Hayworth. The comforter padded the cement of the synagogue’s entrance area just enough, a wadded-up pair of pants worked fine for a pillow, and it felt almost cozy to be wedged between the stony backside of the planter and the lumpy bulk of the Navy surplus duffel bag in which he kept everything he owned. He was Army, not Navy, and that was a long goddam time ago; he’d lifted the duffel off somebody’s double-load washer up at the laundromat.
The cops weren’t who Jojo was worried about. If you kept your ass off the sidewalk, mostly they’d leave you alone except if you were camped out down on Skid Row. They’d been rousting people around there again lately, some political bullshit with the LAPD and the city council and pressure from the real estate companies who were turning all those old office buildings, abandoned small factories and sweatshops into high priced condos, lofts and apartments. He understood. Who wanted to pay the kind of money he’d heard those places sold or rented for, just to get a view out their window of blocks full of people living in tents and cardboard boxes like animals, piss smell everywhere and crack whores turning tricks in the Porta-Potties, if you could imagine the stench and even think of sex under such conditions, and then the police sirens and the ambulance sirens wailing all of the day and all of the night, too. He could see why the pressure was on downtown, which was why he had migrated out here to the Fairfax District, where they generally left you alone unless you were creating a problem for them that they felt themselves duty bound to resolve,, like hassling people for spare change at the bus stop or taking a whiz in public.
But Jojo didn’t make any kind of trouble for anybody. Mornings, he walked up and down beside the line of cars stopped at the red light at Beverly Boulevard, holding up a sign he had printed with a magic marker saying HOMELESS PLEASE HELP GOD BLESS YOU. For lunch, assuming he’d made a few dollars by that time, he went to the Jew restaurant, a charity place where they gave you a couple of chicken legs, some vegetables and all the bread you could eat for less than two bucks, and let you wash up in the john, too.
Then it was back to work for the afternoon, a 16 ounce can of beer getting warm inside its brown paper bag as he stalked half a block up from the light, then half a block back, stepping onto the curb each time the traffic started up and resuming his patrol when the light turned red again.
After dark, he would roam the neighborhood until he found a safe place to sleep, which wasn’t all that easy. By now, he’d passed a night or two just about everywhere: Behind the bus shelter on Beverly, off the alley next to the back door of the Korean fruit and vegetable store, in the alcove in front of the stationary shop, over in the park under those picnic tables that were concrete like the synagogue’s planters. But you weren’t safe anywhere, and it wasn’t the cops but the other homeless you had to watch out for. Some of them would rip you off for everything, down to your extra gym shoes with the worn-out soles (for dry days only) and recyclable bottles, if you didn’t practically chain yourself to your stash.
And they could get violent, these people. The rage would just boil up in them out of nowhere, without warning. Back in July, some woman he’d seen here and there pushing her grocery cart around the neighborhood,, a big old girl with short-cut white hair and upper arms as meaty as his thighs, had ducked behind the bus shelter while he was fast asleep and kicked him a good one right in the small of his back. Must have been wearing combat boots, was how it felt. It still hurt.
Jojo hadn’t come all the way out here from Florida with this kind of a life in mind, of course. What happened was that after 20 years crewing on shrimpers out of the Keys, just about when he’d figured it was time for them to make him a skipper, the fleet owners gave a black man that position on the boat he was working. Jojo knew how to go along and get along, like a man learns how to do. But crew under a nigger? AT his age and his level of experience? That was not for Jojo. That was just not right. He started drinking more than usual, not only nights anymore but on the boat, too. Somehow he’d managed to keep his mouth shut and bide his time, waiting for what, he didn’t have the foggiest.
But the drinking took its toll. He’d make mistakes with the nets and the tackle, leave things on deck in dangerous places. He’d get so wiped out that he’d lose whole days and nights, and his wife Ada Kay had to call in sick for him. He’d beaten her up a couple of times, too, although that wasn’t him, Lord knew.
Finally Joseph Junior had come down from Miami, where he ran a small seafood restaurant with his “partner,” which Jojo was damn well aware was a code word these days for a fag boyfriend, and he had had the nerve to bring the boyfriend with him. Eduardo was his name, a Cuban-American guy, dark-haired Latin handsome next to Joe Junior’s redneck good looks. Eduardo was not only a chef, he was also a Tae Kwon Do expert, so that when a soused, raging Jojo lunged at his son to teach him a lesson about butting in on his personal business, Eduardo had laid him out cold right there in his own front yard with some kind of swift, spinning kick. After which Ada Kay had expelled him from their little house and told him not to even think about coming back unless he got clean and sober. She would take a couple extra shifts hostessing at the local chili’s, and Joe Junior and Eduardo would help her out with the expenses she couldn’t cover.
The next morning, he had tossed a few belongings into his third- hand Ford Fairlane, whose paint was patch-faded from exposure and pockmarked by a thousand kicked-up fragments of the crushed coral that covered the surface of the fleet’s parking lot, and driven away from their squat little old bungalow on the mainland. Over in Key West, he found a moldy-smelling basement studio apartment on what seemed like the last ungentrified, non-historically registered block of the city, and tried to get on as best he could. But then a Vietnamese family out of Louisiana bought the shrimper, and having to work for a gook, on top of the humiliation of breaking his balls on deck under a black skipper, was just too many steps over the line.
For as long as his money held out, Jojo lived a life of leisure, pickled in alcohol. He’d sleep all day, get up, shave and shower, cram a six-pack into Joe Junior’s old high school backpack, and go join the tourists, the mimes, the street musicians , and half the resident population of Key West on the Mallory Dock to watch the sun sink into the Straits of Florida while sipping his first beer of the evening. Then, after grabbing a cheeseburger or a fried fish sandwich, he’d hunker down for the rest of the night in the cheapest bar he could find, drinking pitchers of draft that he stretched by pouring his own beer into the pitcher when no one was looking, and watching whatever sporting event happened to be on the bar’s television set.
Jojo was down to his last hundred dollars and miserably aware he had to look for some kind of job the night he decided to drop in at Sloppy Joe’s, right on Duval Street. Sloppy Joe’s was a certified destination for all the vacationers who came by car for a week’s stay or flew in to board a cruise ship. They had a souvenir shop, a menu loaded with overpriced fancied-up versions of local dishes and an annual Hemingway look-alike contest, Although Jojo had never read anything by Hemingway, the framed photos of a burly, bearded Papa fishing for marlin or at work with a good stiff drink sitting beside his typewriter strongly suggested to him that this was one American author who didn’t likely drive the Hershey highway. These days , there sure as hell were fag bars and fag restaurants in Key West, all over the place, but Sloppy Joe’s wasn’t one of them.
By the time he arrived,, Jojo had already spent a few hours drinking elsewhere, and he still had a couple of tall Buds left in Joe Junior’s backpack, Which was good because he knew the pitchers were not going to be cheap. He edged his way through the noisy, crowded main area and into the Backroom, where they had the big screen satellite TV, found himself an empty table in the corner, and ordered a pitcher of draft when the girl came around.
An hour later, he was halfway into his second pitcher and so shitfaced he wasn’t sure which basketball teams were playing each other on the big screen. He had already poured one of the two cans into the first pitcher, and no one had spotted him doing it, he was pretty certain. He looked around. Everyone was watching the game and talking. No one was paying him any mind, and the waitress was out getting drinks and snacks up at the front.
He reached into the backpack, which he had set on the chair beside him, pulled the tab on his last can of Bud, then in one smooth motion brought it out and started pouring, keeping his eyes on the game. Impossibly tall men in Hi-top sneakers thundered toward a basket from mid-court, someone took a lateral pass, wheeled, shot. The TV cut to a close-up of the ball teetering on the rim and everything went silent, waiting.
Suddenly a very large hand clamped down around Jojo’s right forearm and squeezed so hard that Jojo’s fingers sprang open and the nearly full Bud fell into the pitcher, raining beer-splash over the table top.
“What the fuck—“ blurted Jojo with righteous indignation. He had noticed the man standing at one end of the bar when he’d come in. He was a big one,, all right, six-four or six-five if he was an inch, built like a brick shithouse. He was wearing what looked like a service station attendant’s uniform without the name tag, gray pants and matching gray short-sleeved work shirt, his shoulders and biceps and pectorals straining at the seams and buttons like the shirt was two sizes too small. The guy wore his brown hair in a military buzz cut, which you didn’t see on anybody in civilian life anymore. He reminded Jojo of the Army M.P.’s who he’d managed to mostly steer clear of during Basic at Fort Benning and later in Nam, though God knew it hadn’t been easy.
Shifting his grip to Jojo’s elbow, The bouncer from Terminator hell plucked him out of his chair with one hand, scooped up the backpack with the other, and propelled him through the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk.
“I don’t think you’ll want to be returning to this establishment, friend,” the man explained to Jojo as calmly as could be. “I just don’t think it would be in your best interests.”
After everything he’d been through lately, and with all that beer in him, Jojo was in full sloshed-to-hell Kamikaze mode. “Why don’t you just take yourself a flying fuck, asshole,” he slurred. He tried to shove the giant’s rock-hard chest away with his free hand, but was so dizzy that he found himself clutching instead of pushing, and felt the shirt pocket tear loose just as the bouncer lifted him straight up off the ground and knocked him unconscious with a head butt that he realized later had to have been little more than a restrained, merciful tap, or else he’d be dead.
He awoke to find himself sitting against a parking meter, his legs arranged so that they were out of the way of pedestrians. His head was throbbing, his mouth parched, dried blood was caked under his nose, and one eye was definitely en route to Shiner City. He felt something in his closed right hand, and opened it to find a folded-up yellow plastic toothbrush, which he stared at for a mystified second. He hadn’t seen a folding toothbrush since when, he couldn’t even remember. Probably since back when drug stores still had soda fountains. he flicked the toothbrush into the gutter like a cigarette butt and, Using the parking meter for support, hauled himself up to his feet and sucked at the tepid, carbon monoxide-laced humidity for oxygen.
It was then, over or underneath the midnight bustle and horn-honking of Duval Street, he couldn’t have said exactly which,that Jojo heard the voice of God telling him to grab his things and head for California. Simple as that, it came to him. But it was the middle of February, less than a week until the Daytona 500. Although he had followed the Super Bowl of stock car racing for years on TV, he’d never seen it in person and felt like he had to before he left Florida, maybe forever, who knew. He calculated that if he could hear God, God could hear him, too. How about, he proposed to God in his mind, if he just made a little detour for the race and then got right on the road to the West Coast. Just a short delay. He didn’t hear any kind of answer, which he took as a Yes.
So he sold the gas-guzzling, broken-down Fairlane to a young Seminole construction worker he met at a bar for $500 in traveling money, and a few days later, rested up, shaved and showered, crammed what he could into Joe Junior’s backpack, hopped an early Greyhound up to Daytona, and with a little local hitching and a half-mile hike made it to the Speedway a comfortable 30 minutes before that year’s 1:15 P.M. start time. He’d be damned if he was going to miss the cars moving into position, the mega-horsepower engines all cranking and revving, the anticipation, the green flag coming down.
Jojo wasn’t into hopping turnstiles like a kid or trying to bullshit the people behind the ticket windows. A man with the right skills and the right tools didn’t have to do those kinds of things. In an outside pocket of the backpack, he’d brought along a heavy duty flat-blade Craftsman screwdriver with a long, heavy shaft. It didn’t take him more than about 90 seconds working on the security fence in a quiet place behind the back stretch stands to pry open enough links to make a hole he could slip through, and then he just strolled right in, found an empty seat, pulled the bill of his Braves cap low over his face to keep out the sun, bought himself two beers and an order of nachos from the vendor, and settled in.
The field surged forward in packs, everyone riding in everybody else’s slipstream, bumper to bumper and three cars abreast, sparks flying from the passing kisses of body metal against body metal. At speeds well over 150 m.p.h. ,, the congestion was bound to cause trouble. Anybody could see that. So Jojo wasn’t that surprised when a horrendous crash on the 175th lap sent Tony Steweart’s car flying end over end and ricocheted 18 other entries out of the lineup.
But no one expected what happened half a mile from the finish line at the last turn of lap 200. the front-runners, bunched up together like some kind of jittering multi-celled steel creature,, growled past Jojo down the straightaway headed for Turn Four and the home stretch. The finishing order was going to be close. There was Michael Waltrip still out front with Dale Earnhardt, Jr. hard behind, and two cars back you could see Dale Earnhardt Senior, NASCAR’s pirate-mustachioed champion of champions, The Intimidator, jostling his black Monte Carlo left and right to block challenges to the lead cars, because both of them were driving their chevies for his Dale Earnhardt, Inc. North Carolina team.
And then Sterling Marlin’s dodge closed in on Earnhardt senior from behind and tapped his left rear quarter panel, driving him up the banked outside curve and into the concrete wall at an angle, 180 was the impact speed they estimated later. Which was bad enough, except that then Kenny Schrader came around the turn wide so that his yellow Pontiac plowed broadside into Earnhardt and the two of them slid back down onto the infield, where their machines both finally came to a stop. Schrader managed to scramble out of the Dodge’s glassless driver side window, but Earnhardt just sat there, crumpled behind the wheel of Number 3. Waltrip, unaware, flew across the finish line for his first-ever Daytona 500 win while the ambulances raced over the grass and the paramedics cut a hole in the Monte Carlo’s roof with acetylene torches so they could lift Earnhardt out.
The proximate cause of death had been Skull base injuries, said a doctor in a news flash on the country music station that was playing loud in the cab of the trucker who’d picked Jojo up at an I-10 westbound onramp heading out of Jacksonville. Earnhardt had been 49 years old.
Same as me, Jojo had thought, watching the road slip backward into the night beneath the semi’s headlights as they crossed into Alabama and then on into Mississippi. And I’m still here. Jojo’s still here. The Lord must have plans for me. No doubt about it. No doubt about it at all
To be continued…