Killers
by
Lynn Hoffman
Tuesday
I remember exactly when I decided to kill Jim Pifkie. It was just before noon on a Tuesday morning after a long Columbus Day weekend. On the Friday before the festivities, I started drinking: whole cedary, scratchy, dirty bottles of dark red wine. By Sunday I was sure I was dying. By Tuesday I was way past
drunk, working on crazy and well into poisoned; if Congress had made Columbus
Day into Columbus Week, I would have been dead by Thursday.
Deciding to kill Pifkie was the best thing I did all day. Oh sure, it was
the same day I screamed obscenities at my oldest living relative and threw a
wine bottle at a male prostitute. And I almost bit a fat lady on the saggy
flesh at the back of her neck. Drooled all over her in fact. Good stuff,
highlights film stuff. But none of it was half as satisfying as deciding that
I was going to kill Jim Pifkie.
When I was a kid, Columbus Day was special. My father-Solomone Cardoso-
came to this country one Columbus Day in the early 1950‚s. My mother, a sweet
Catholic girl who converted to Judaism to marry him, let him name me Emanuel.
My dad never said he immigrated‚ he always said he discovered America‚. In
our family, we were never particularly enthusiastic about Thanksgiving and
Christmas was just a day off, but Columbus Day was our Easter, our day of
Resurrection.
We always had a big family party and after dinner, my father would dance.
When he danced, his face danced with him. The dances felt like little stories
and you could feel the narrations in the vibrations of his feet, imagine the
characters at whom he was smiling and frowning and clicking his tongue. His
eyes fluttered and his lips took a hundred different poses below the wide
ledge of his moustache. I was five years old when I began to memorize his
little smiles and smirks and pouts and purses. He swirled and dipped and his
eyebrows could make a wave of their own, like a string of corks on the ocean.
He would stamp his foot just softly enough not to upset the phonograph needle
or the neighbors. His jaw would go down and out, lip-smacking the air to fill
in the sound his heel barely made as he brushed it along the wooden floor.
It was many years later when I discovered the rest, learned that the
stories were about confiscations and late-night escapes and heroes and sick
goodbyes and death. But those were just details. Everything that mattered was
there in his dancing, all the feelings and all the ghosts.
Sometimes he would jig a handkerchief at my red-haired, freckly mother
and she would take the bait, pinching her end of the cloth and following him
around the room. Her movements were as compact as his were expansive; her
hand just outboard of her hip, fingers splayed out suggestively, elbow thrown
back. Her dancing was economically lewd, frugal, not stingy. It gave the
scratchy middle eastern music everything it deserved. When he danced with
her, his story changed. In this chapter, he was playful, then macho, then
silly then desperately wanting. Sometimes at the end of a dance, he would tremble
and when I was little, I thought it meant he was cold.
My mother moved as if she were a seed blown on the wind. Her dance
seemed to cost her no effort but that of willing it. My father perspired when
he danced. It should have been grotesque and it was beautiful. To this day, I
am not especially moved by the people they call charismatic - I was raised by
a man who could dance in tongues.
Years later, when I was an all grown up small-time restaurant reviewer
and often too busy to make it home for Columbus Day, my father retired and
invested the savings of twenty-nine years in real estate. The deal he bought
into turned out to be a scam and within a month of investing, the company
disappeared along with their money. Fifty-three days after he realized he had
made them both poor, my father sat down next to a running automobile in a
closed garage and killed himself in a sure-fire, mess-proof, easy-as-
possible-on-the-survivors way. . My mother died in her sister‚s house seven
months later, propped up on pillows and staring at a spot on the wall.
The man who swindled him was named Jim Pifkie. We used to work for the
same weekly city paper. He is now a big shot syndicated financial columnist
and I still write the restaurant column for the weekly.
I introduced him to my parents.
Now my mom and dad are both dead, Jim Pifkie is still alive and so am I.
Every Columbus Day weekend, I have a vision whenever I close my eyes or go
from a light place to a dark one. I see my father dancing. He loops and leaps
and stamps and clicks. His circling arms gather in the wind and throw out
showers of gold. And as he dances, his face, a surprised and thoroughly dead
olive blue frozen mask, jerks along after his body like a balloon on a
string. ( Did I mention that I introduced them to the man who, with perfect
precision and infallible insulation from prosecution, took all their money?
Yeah, I did.)
I have the vision at other times too; usually at seasons and celebrations
when everybody else is at least pretending to be happy. The last time was
after a beach party. I spent three hours talking and listening with a woman
who made me laugh. I promised to call her, left the party swollen with
expectation. Or maybe just swollen. The vision came that night just after my
eyes closed, my father’s cyanotic face surprised and hurt.
Sometimes I leave all the lights on and try to drink enough red wine to
slip around it. Can you drink away a vision of a headless dead Dad? I don't
know, but the score so far is a lot to nothing in favor of: you can't.
The fat lady was standing facing the street at the bus stop leaning
sideways into the Daily News honor box. She looked sad in the same hopeful
way Miss America contestants look happy; like she expected an award for it.
She was fifty or so and slumped inside an orange tweed coat with a few inches
of bread dough skin showing above her collar.
You could almost see the tape inside her head fully rewound and ready. If
anybody had been dumbfuck enough to ask her, she would have started playing
back all the things that went wrong with her two inch universe. She was the
only creature in sight who had a shot at being more pathetic than I was.
I decided to bite one of her neck folds just to see if she would scream.
I wasn't looking for little yips or mournful Motheragods. I wanted to hear
something from down in the stale locker room of her bowels, something that
sounded like life. I wanted to be an actual, bite-the-fat-lady-and-call-a-
sports-radio-talk-show-to-tell-about-it kind of guy.
She didn‚t move as I put my coins in the honor box and got my paper. I
closed the door and counted her breaths; one, two and reached my jaws around
her left shoulder and smacked my lips. Her skin had a powdery look and a
greasy cheap cooking oil bouquet. It was like sniffing a damp memo pad. The
smell of her reminded me for a second of Three Feathers Blended whiskey. I
moved closer, aiming my teeth for a spot on the open plains in between two of
the deepest craters. An astronaut. Now the smell of her cheesy grey flesh
reminded me of shredded provolone, the good, two-year old kind. Reminders,
reminders.
She didn't notice me, or at least she didn't move. I flipped out of my
trance for a minute and saw myself standing at Broad and Lombard about to
take this stale smelling corpse of a woman between my teeth. I once saw a
Labrador Retriever holding a cat turd between his teeth. Then a little drop
of saliva popped out of my mouth and landed, trailing a stream behind it,
right on her neck. For a second we were connected by a silver thread of
drool.
People were staring. I got scared and sick and spit out on to the
sidewalk. The fat lady turned, orange coat and all.
She didn't say anything and her eyes didn't seem to focus. She may have
never noticed me. I heard a man's bass voice say "Hey, you, what the hell do
you think you're doing?" A greasy ski-slope feeling climbed up to the inside
of my lips. I wanted to puke but the tank was on empty. I knew I needed help.
The fat lady started to turn. I ran. I would have hated myself if there had been
any self left to hate. The closest thing I had to a feeling was something like
embarrassment. Back at the apartment I started rummaging for help
There was a bottle of '82 Mouton Rothschild in the wine room. I'd been
saving it for a time like this. My tasting notes on the blue index card said
"malodorous and vulgar with dominant flavors of mushrooms and rotten
cherries." I passed it by-too much saving grace. In the freezer I found four
giant gel caps. They were repackaged downers I got from a committed, earth-
oriented recycler.
"One," she told me "is too many".
I took two. The sick feeling went away and a wave of weakness passed
over me like polluted Jersey surf. It wasn't death, but it wasn't bad, and in
that instant I knew what was wrong with my life.
Jim Pifkie was alive and he should be dead.
The boxy red numbers on the espresso machine's clock insisted it was 11:22 AM.
I knew what had to happen. I had to sober up, drink some orange juice
and take a shower. Then I just had to decide how to kill Jim Pifkie. It
wouldn’t be hard, no master plan needed, no flow chart called for. The world
would tell me what I needed to know: hell, it always had. All I had to do
was live life and I’d get my answer. There was one little detour I needed to
make, one item that ought to be on every murderer’s check list: I had to make
sure that I wasn’t insane.
To get to the Free People's Mental Health Clinic in West Philadelphia you
have to turn down the alley next to Caccione's Pizza.My revelation was just a
few hours old and I wanted to share it with Salvatore.
Dr. Salvatore Mastrolino is about six-foot four or five with long black
curls hanging over his shoulders. He was a South Philadelphia High School
tough guy-Sally Knuckles to his friends who woke up one morning and found
himself smart. One day he was a wise guy and the next day he was just wise.
He went down south and got his doctors in counseling from the University
of Big Dumb Rednecks in Apaskagogee where he developed a taste for country
music and tried to stay out of fights. He hung out with musicians and
volunteered at a drug clinic. During his training he mostly counseled guys
who were having problems in their relationships with their sheep or their
sisters.
Sal came back to Philadelphia a changed man. He had a love for the pedal
steel guitar and a new insight about his sister Donna. He also came back with
a near-quakerish distaste for violence and a warm feeling for the occasional
skin pop of heroin. A thoroughly post-modern therapist.
Going to see Sal at the clinic was a mixed blessing. On the one hand
there was Nora, the receptionist. Nora had enormous tits and asthma. On the
other hand there was the smell of diapers, cloves and saffron in the waiting
room. So while you sat with your overcoat on your lap breathing in Curry-on-
Pampers, you could listen to Nora wheeze and watch her tits bounce. Usually
she'd breathe in with a little rattle and hoist 'em up. Then, when they were
about as elevated as anything that heavy is going to get, she'd let them down
with a whistle. Raaaaaattle, tits to the max, peak and wheeehihn down they
go. Raaaaaattle, wheeehihn. (One of the shrinks at the clinic, Moris Fisher,
told me once that he could give himself a hard-on just by imitating Nora's
breathing, Then he proved it.)
From April to September, Nora didn't wear a bra. Her right nipple seemed
to be your standard baby bottle variety but the left one was long and slender
and veered outboard. If you wrapped a paper around her left nipple, you could
have smoked it. I probably would have asked Nora for smoking privileges
myself except that she was one of those working-class girls who went to
therapy, got honest and then ended up with a big mouth. She told everybody
everything.
One night, while I was waiting for Salvatore, she told me about her
ruined marriage. It seems that she married Marty when they were both just out
of high school. He always had a great car and the summer after graduation,
they got tattooed in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania and married in Elkton,
Maryland. Some nights when Nora was really maudlin she'd show you her
souvenir of Marcus Hook. I didn't think it would take much to get her to show
you her reminder of Elkton either. Anyway it seems that Marty developed a
taste and then a hankering and then a demanding, whining, insistent lust for
anal sex. Eventually Nora didn't know which way to turn, so she ditched
Marty, turned to the clinic for help and never left.
When she told me the story I felt like she had picked me out from all the
other nuts with no trust fund as an especially sensitive guy. Then I walked
into Sal's office and heard her saying to a pale gray white woman wearing a
sari. "I met Marty in High School...."
But anyway this was October and Tuesday was Nora's day off. No Nora, no
nipple, just the stink of the waiting room, a Vietnamese movie poster, a few
back issues of Black Thang magazine, and me. Almost forty years old and
waiting for my shrink at two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon with the rubbery
smell of fat lady lingering in my imagination.
At least I still had my Daily News. I turned to the food-review section
to see what my competition was doing.
I read my way past The Two Minute Gourmet and was right in the middle of
Hot Dog Hot Line by the time someone said "Mr. Cardoso, Dr. Mastrolino will
see you now." As soon as I walked in Sal's office, I told him about my
Columbus Weekend.
"Ya know Sal, it's a stupid holiday for a Spanish Jew anyway, I mean it
smells of death and escape and the riches of the Indies and it's named for
some deluded gentile who got it all wrong but ended up all right. My Irish
relatives don't celebrate Potato Famine Day." Sal Mastrolino was unmoved. I
could tell because he wasn't moving. He was staring at something on the floor
on the other side of his desk. I needed to hook him, to get him involved in
this session. I thought about a riff on "whose idea was it to move Columbus
Day to a Monday and turn it into a Weekend anyway? " but it seemed too much
like amateur night at the comedy club and not enough like a soul desperate
for help.
So I told him my other big secret. “I hate my job. No, I don’t hate it, I’
m just not impressed by it anymore. It seems so fuckin‚ trivial.” He barely
moved.
So I told him the story about the harmless fat lady at the bus stop; a
therapist-trapping tale if ever there was one. Sal listened a while, right
through to the drool. Then he asked me a question:
“Are you an only child.”?
He always asks me that. For a second I thought about telling him that
I'd discovered that I really had a half sister; my father's illegitimate
daughter that he created with a Philadelphia woman named Mastrolino, but
something held me back.
Sal's sense of humor was erratic. At high tide it tumbled everything on
the beach in laughter, it picked out the ridiculous needle in the mundane
haystack. At low tide it left this slightly tilted shore covered with Angry
Irritable Bastard shells. Maybe that's why I loved him, but it was certainly
why I distrusted his nonviolence act. Anyway, whatever the state of the tide,
Sal's size was a constant and it was a constant Extra Large. I decided to
pass on his straight line and for the nineteenth time, I reminded him that I
was an only child and that scientists had discovered that too much time
listening to Loretta Lynn can make you as stupid as dryer lint.
Then I told him about the orange juice and the downers and the wine and my crystal bright vision of killing Jim Pifkie. I reminded him that my lust had dried up in
the last year or so and my sense of humor might be the next thing to go. I was a
man in decline.
"The problem, Manny" he said "isn't with killing Pifkie.....the problem
is that all this is so....you know....unfocused. I mean what does biting a
harmless old woman have to do with a mealy-mouthed, pious altar boy
columnist? What the hell's the connection here? You haven’t been with a woman
in a long time and your only idea is to bite one on the neck? It don’t make
sense, boy-o.? It sounds like you wanna do some screaming yourself."
He had a point.
Home from the clinic, there were two messages on my answering machine.
Message One was from my aging hipster editor who thinks that food is funny
and ugly is cute. Could I cover the Multicultural Food Festival? The woman
who handled the multicultural beat couldn't make it and, well...it'd be nice
to have somebody show up.....It was the newspaper's shit work, the kind of
thing you have to do if you're not syndicated and you want to keep your job,
but maybe there would be a story in it, maybe something that could bust me
out of the restaurant world and into the news.
Message Two was from my boyhood buddy Rico, who grew up
around the corner from me . He said there was a movie on channel ten about our old
neighborhood. Eight o'clock and he blew me a kiss.
I found a bottle of wine lying on its side in the kitchen wine rack. I
opened it and tuned in channel ten. The wine was a sleeper; JHeinrich from
Burgenland, flavor, finesse and wood for nine bucks and nobody knows about
it. The show wasn't bad either. Sentimental. Enough cranked-up public domain
emotion to keep my own feelings quiet for a while. About half way into the
bottle I decided that the show was authentic enough. When they did the scene
with the famous first baseman and the two kids, I decided to give my aunts in
Poughkeepsie a call.
The aunts are my mother's sisters; stingy and secretive, their whole
pissant lives tucked away like colostomy bags hidden behind flowered
housedresses.. But they lived in the old neighborhood when I was a boy. In
fact they were like mothers to me.
One of the aunts married a guy who beat her up--I heard that once he was
carrying her up to the attic with a noose around her neck when the police
showed. She didn't press charges.
The other aunt didn't even get the charges to press. Her husband had a
heart attack and took to his bed. Thirty-two years later the heart attack
killed him. She probably should have called the cops too, but what would she
have said? "Officer, he's malingering"?
The aunts didn't answer. It was the first time that I ever called them
that they weren't in. They don't go out a lot. One or two funerals a year,
down to the Shop-Right every couple weeks, that's about it. An hour later, I
called back, curious.
Seems the malingerer's widow had had a little heart attack of her own,
ambulance, intensive care. Didn't want to bother me, the other aunt said.
What the fuck, a 76 year old woman has a coronary, would you tell the family?
They didn't want to bother me when another one of their sisters died. I heard
about that second hand. Never wanted to bother me by picking up the phone.
Ever. Always said a prayer for me they allowed, but they must have said it at
night when the rates were lower.
So I started screaming at the wife beater's widow. She's seventy-eight,
but enough's enough. Ya gotta get 'em in line sometimes. I called her a
cheapcrazyIrishcunt and brought to mind her days on the attic stairs with the
clothesline necktie. Allowed as how if her late beloved hadn't been such an
incompetent fuckup of a drizzlebrained paranoid prick himself, we could have
gotten all this over years ago when long distance rates were higher but we
would have saved on interest. Rule of 72, I reminded her. It all compounds.
And then, like you do when you fight with someone you're stuck with, I
called a cease fire when I ran out of breath. I told her I'd call her back
tomorrow when I got myself under control. Under control of what? When I could
hold the knife better, I guess. When I could crawl up the telephone line and
wring her stupid chicken neck. And make soup.
My throat was sore from screaming at her and all the wine had fried right
out of me. It was just after sunset on Tuesday night. I was afraid of what I
might see when it got dark. I was scared of falling asleep.
I dragged my mind back to a meditation about killing Pifkie. I decided to
try out a little drama, see what it would tell me. My apartment is on the
third floor of a four story walk-up, Pine St. near Rittenhouse Square. I
walked out of my apartment door and up to the fourth floor. I undid the lock
on the trap door and wriggled my way up the iron ladder to the roof. From
17th to 18th street, it was one big black tar gridiron with roof ridges
marking the yard lines.
I could imagine playing games up there, urban lacrosse on a tar black
field. Maybe join this block to the next one with a few slippery footbridges
and some rope swings. We could turn the whole neighborhood into one giant
playing field. Everybody on attack, everybody on defense, we'd call it
Philadelphia Rules Lacrosse. I'd want to be League Commissioner. Or maybe
Chief Shaman of the local team. No pansy-assed aerobics in this game, just
amphetamines and death chants and the symbolic eating of chunks of raw liver.
No electric cattle prods allowed until the League Championship Series.
Sometimes I would hallucinate whole leagues and series and sports talk
shows with player interviews. Some moron with his teeth, lips, and gums
capped shoves a microphone into a player's face. You can see the Rouse Tower
in the background and flashes of light from the ambulance on the buildings
across the street
'What position do you play"?
"Left Junky"
"How did you feel when you saw your teammate flipped off the roof"?
" I was curious....I wanted to get the number of the ambulance so I could
play it in the lottery...."
"Would that be the street number or the legal number ?" the announcer is
just a tad too interested...
"Up on the roof you always play the street number.......'course if the
guy's already dead, ya gotta box it."
"Yeah.....Back to you Ralph....."
One snowy night I imagined a wadded towel of a football held together
with a web belt and people playing in teflon soled sneakers. Guy falls off
the roof, you try to start booing before he hits the ground. Last one
inbounds wins.
A few times, I tried to get some drunks to go up there and invent a game
with me. Somehow they just didn't see it.
But that night I wasn't looking for team sports. Tonight I was going to
practice killing Pifkie.. I walked to the end of the block of houses with my
half empty wine bottle. I peeked in the skylight near the end of the field to
see if the young waitrons in love were up to anything. They weren't and then
I was at the corner.
Four stories down there was a he-whore. There was usually at least one.
Some nights it got up to three or even four boys preening themselves and
jumping into passing cars. It could get crowded.
But tonight the kid had the street all to himself. He was waiting in the
puddle of light on the southwest corner, walking back to the lamppost and the
center of the light and then over to a trash can on the edge. He jerked when
he walked and snapped his head around, covering the two streams of oncoming
traffic. I couldn't figure if this kid looked more like a chicken or a
sparrow.
I wondered just what exactly he did in those cars, and how he did it and
how much he got paid. I mean was it a living or what?
A red eurosedan pulled up and the window slid down electrically. The palm
of my hand came to life on the bottle and I raised it behind me and stopped.
Too much wine to share with the pavement. I pulled the cork and took a drink,
rolled the wine against my teeth and swallowed. Good wine. A St Emilion de
Montagne called La Fleur Plaisance. There was a nice taste of fruit to it and
a rough little spiciness. The finish was long and woody, all sandalwood and
cedar. Not bad for eighty bucks a case and a trip to Jersey. My shoulders
were nice and loose. I put the cork back in and readjusted my grip on the
bottle. Cork out, had a little more wine, looked down and the red car was
gone.
There wasn't much wine left when the gray sedan with the passenger side
window rolled down turned the corner and pulled up just past the trash can.
It was almost too far out of the light pool for a good shot, but not quite.
Degree of difficulty. I wonder what the East German judge would say. Pifkie
lives a few blocks from me, all alone, in a row house just like mine. If I
could get to his roof, maybe I could bomb him to death.
The boy jerked over to the window and arched himself over it. His body
covered most of the window and cast a shadow on the rest. I focused my eyes
and my arm and my aim and my toss on the tiny reflection of a chrome window
button that was just picking up a reflection of a traffic light down the
block. The bottle dropped in a perfect malevolent arc and missed the car by
about three feet. Naturally, the bottle missed the kid too. It landed on
the sidewalk behind him and popped green glass out in a blossom. Some of it
bounced off the kid's legs and a few pieces rattled against the door of the
car. The kid did a super spinning jerk around to his right, looking down the
streets for the bottle launcher. Hookers never, never look up.
The driver floored it out of there, fishtailing and jamming on his brakes
after a hundred feet so he could peek and blast through the red light on
Lombard Street and disappear into South Philly. I wonder if the guy in the
car had buddies he could tell the story to. I wondered where he was going
next. Does he go to a saloon with a name like P.J. Kidfucker's where he walks
in, takes a stool, gets a glass of the usual and says "you ain't gonna
believe what happened to me tonight"? Does he have a pal on the other side of
the peanut bowl who says "Yeah, I know what ya mean. Goddamn kids"?
The kid, meanwhile, is still spinning. He's looking every way but up and
his head is following his body around in double and triple takes. He touches
his leg where the shards hit, no blood. Touches again, spins sharply to his
left. I want a Strauss waltz to escape from a rink somewhere and come join
us. I guess he doesn't know what to do because there isn't anything to do.
Little chicken's all wound up like a spring and the action's over. I figured
I shot and missed and killed him anyway. So, being out of bottles and ideas,
I turned my back to the edge of the roof and walked back to the trap door and
down the ladder to my apartment.
The whole adventure wasn't as much fun as you'd think. I didn't feel much
closer to killing Pifkie. Even if I could climb up on his roof, and even if I
could catch him as he walked out the door, could I be sure of hitting him
with a gallon bottle of Chateau Luzerne? Probably not.
I reached for another bottle of La Fleur, but that didn't seem right. I
was almost a full bottle into the evening and by the time I was halfway down
the next one, my taste buds would be a bit, shall we say, dulled. I hated to
drink good wine when I was too drunk to enjoy it. So I opened a swing-top
bottle of Groltsch to think it over.
I knew there was most of a case of Miguel Torres Chilean Cabernet in the
spare bedroom. Nice wine, but not so nice that you shouldn't use it
pharmaceutically when you had to.
I opened the door to the wine room and threw the light switch. I took a
minute to admire it. Boxes, rack and shelves˜ over fifty cases of wine. A
specially built rack for half bottles, methodically stolen orange milk
cartons for loose bottles of red, blue ones for white. One closet just for
reds that weren't ready and whites that weren't quite. A reach in rack just
inside the door for every day drinking and some opened cases along the wall
below the air conditioner. The thermometer on the outside wall read sixty,
the one in the top of the closet said sixty-three. The best of all possible
worlds.
Off to the right of the air conditioner and as far as possible from the
partially blocked heat vent was a stack of cases: mostly rare Austrian stuff
with funny names like Umathum and Nittnaus. I kept them for company and
sometimes they kept me company.
But not tonight. There were nine bottles of the Torres cabernet in their
original cardboard case. Make that eight. I got out one of the large jelly
jar glasses reserved for industrial strength wine drinking. It had Crusader
Rabbit and Rags the Tiger silk screened right on it and I‚ve found that Rags
and Crusader never let ya down.
I opened the Torres, poured a glass and limbered up my throwing arm.
Sitting on the arm of the couch I crumpled pages of the Daily News and
launched them at a stock pot on the kitchen floor twenty feet away. I focused
my energy. I willed them to hit. I even put down my glass. I became the
target, I became crumpled newspaper. I was hitting one out of five. Eugene
Herrigel, kiss my ass. I fetched my copy of Zen to Go and dropped it on my
foot.
I could see a problem here. How was I going to carry out a full-fledged
long distance, prosecution-proof assassination if I couldn't even drop a wine
bottle on a street hustler?
The first glass of the Torres didn't have the answer so I interviewed the
top third of another and corked the bottle. I opened a book on Mexican
cooking and decided it was time for bed. I undressed in front of the hamper,
brushed and flossed, wrote three things on a memo pad, decided not to jerk
off and went to sleep.