86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,54

the Van Wyck Expressway Dennis let me know that he and Che-Che had met three weeks before in the lobby at Quick, the ad agency where they were both under contract. They were totally hot for each other and he’d been crashing at her place in the Village ever since. Apparently Dennis was a moron. Nineteen years old. A kid from Paramus with a football scholarship who’d passed it up for a modeling career. A real lightbulb of a kid.

On the on-ramp to the Triborough Bridge Dennis raised the car’s tinted partition window then pulled a two-gram bottle out of his shirt pocket. “How ’bout a pick-me-up,” he sang.

“Pass,” I said. “Maybe some other time. My tastes run more toward bottled in bond.”

“Huh?”

“My drug of choice is bourbon,” I said. “It comes in bottles with a government stamp covering the cap.” Then I pulled a pint bottle of Early Times from my inside jacket pocket and showed Einstein the cap and seal.

“No shit?” says Dennis. “I never noticed. Hey, I just learned something new.”

While he began horning two big scoops from the vial with the end of a penknife, I turned to him, actually taking the kid in for the first time. “Well, there ya go,” I said. “Always happy to help.”

“Uh-huh,” Dennis said.

The first series of gigs that week began on a Friday. The department stores on Fifth Avenue. While I drove beautiful black-haired blue-eyed Che-Che, she had her face touched up in the backseat by a sweet girl name Ida.

My client was a kick. By the second stop her wardrobe was all over the car, slung on top of the limo’s jump seats and stacked in my front passenger area. When she’d do a dress change she’d pull the last outfit off and be near naked in her thonged panties. Che-Che never wore a bra. She knew I couldn’t help but watch but she didn’t care. It was just business.

“You getting your kicks up there, pisano?” she snickered as she slipped into a pair of fitted slacks, her pelvis in midair.

“You bet, blue eyes,” I said back. “I’m having the time of my life.”

And everyone was a cocksucker. The store managers, the leering, fat pimple-faced security guy at Saks, the rep from the Quick Agency. All of ’em.

Outside Lord & Taylor there were photographers and no one except a lazy security guy to escort her into the store.

“Hey Bruno, tell that dipshit door-shaker cocksucker I’m not getting out of the car until he gets rid of the fucking mob in front. Tell the cazzo I’m twenty minutes late and I’ll rat him the fuck out unless he wakes up and does his fucking job!”

“Okay, Che-Che, I’ll tell him,” I said.

Then the amazing smile. “Hey Brunissimo, you havin’ a good time? Need anything? A soda or something?”

“Your twin sister. Do you have one?”

Later that night Che-Che and her Rhodes Scholar boyfriend attended a private screening at Clearsky movie theater on Eighty-sixth Street. On the way from her place in the Village to the Upper East Side she and Dennis kissed a little and groped each other, then started drinking from the bar and snorting lines.

“Hey, Bruno,” Che-Che giggled up from the backseat a few minutes from the theater, “how are you getting along with long-haired Rip Van Winkle? Your partner, Kong Koffman?”

“Okay, I guess. Mostly okay.”

“Did you know I quit using Dav-Ko as my New York limo service? Like, a year or so ago. I switched over to DEMURE. But, now I’m changing back because of you, Bruno baby. Because you’re the only blue Benz stretch guy for me.”

“Thanks, Che-Che. I appreciate the business. You know that.”

“Know why I quit using Kong Koffman’s Camel Caravan?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I bet you’re gonna tell me.”

“It’s because Kong was padding my goddamn bill all the fucking time. Twenty minutes here, half an hour there. Once the asshole charged me for a full day because I left the car at one in the afternoon. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t spend a grand a week with the big dufus queen.”

I decided to change the subject. “How come you call David, Kong?” I asked.

“C’mon Bruno, you’re shittin’ me. You know why, don’t you? I mean, that’s his nickname. Everyone at the clubs calls him that. Kong.”

“Honest to Christ, I really don’t know. David and I don’t exactly move in the same circles, other than business.”

Che-Che was laughing. “Well, sweetcakes, it’s because your dear partner is rumored to have a twelve-inch