New York, but after his dad died and left him a nice piece of change, he relocated West about ten years ago and started his own thing with his windfall.
He was the only man to give me a chance on this side of The Wall.
We’d shot some eight ball, then called it quits and posted up at the small bar, beers on the counter, chilling the night away. I was reading parts of the L.A. Times, looking for new words to add to my vocabulary. I loved learning ten-dollar words like abstemious and solipsism, then throwing them in a conversation and watching the stupid light come on in somebody’s eyes.
Wolf was stroking his goatee with two fingers while he struggled with the crossword puzzle. Both of us had on dark suits. Mine was Italian. Wolf’s was more conservative, along the Brooks Brothers style. The poor always tried to look rich and the rich tried to look normal.
“Eighty-one across ... five letters.” Wolf grunted. He sounded like an old man who’d smoked since he was evicted from his momma’s womb. “Driver, what the hell is baklava glue?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“C‘mon man. Help a brother out.”
Pedro was passing by, heard Wolf call himself a brother and laughed. Pedro was the bartender, a short, clean-cut, thick Hispanic man. Looked like Enrique Iglesias with bad metabolism and a smooth salt-and-pepper goatee. Second generation in this country. He was in his forties and had married his high school sweetheart the day he got out of the army.
I said, “You hear that, Pedro?”
Pedro shrugged. “Marrying a black woman has made him black by osmosis.”
We all laughed at that.
Pedro was a former aerospace worker who got downsized from his cozy sixty-thousand-dollar-a-year gig as a project engineer at Northrop almost ten years ago. He spent two years looking for a job and trying to feed his family off his 401(k) and unemployment. He retrained, then finally got on at Boeing at a serious pay cut. He was about to get downsized at Boeing, a nasty little déjà vu, but got fired before they could kick him out. Something went down. He went postal and beat the shit out of his manager and tried to choke him into an early grave. Down here, people admired Pedro for what he did. A lot of disgruntled motherfuckers wanted to do the same to both the man and the system. That was four years back, with eight months of that spent on lockdown, twice as long in anger management.
Wolf ranked on Pedro. “You’re as Mexican as Taco Bell and you’re breaking my balls?”
Pedro shook his head. “Here we go again. Dean Martin walks in with Sammy Davis, Jr., and the corny jokes come out.”
I told Wolf, “I think he just called you Sammy Davis, Jr.”
More laughter while blues man Robert B. Jones sang about a kindhearted woman.
“Driver, what’s up with your people?” Wolf turned to me. “Mexi cans have all the jobs that the black people used to have.”
Pedro retorted, “Don’t hate.”
Wolf went on, “Walk on a construction site, into the kitchen at a soul food restaurant, or check out the hotel workers, hardly a black person in sight.”
I shot Wolf the middle finger of love.
Pedro retorted, “It’s our damn country, asshole. And for your information the original name of this land given by the original people was El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles but we had to shorten it because the gringos came over on the short yellow bus.”
“Are you insulting me, Pedro? Is that a racial slur I hear?”
“Damn right. Your Brad Pitt-looking ass don’t like it, hop in your Ferrari and go back to whatever part of Europe your pagan people migrated from.”
“I’m Catholic. And I drive a Lamborghini.”
Pedro huffed. “The cheap one.”
“Cheap? You drive a Hyundai.”
“The expensive one.”
Outrageous laughter came from all three of us.
I said, “The original residents called this part of the country Wenot, Pedro. Downtown was Yang-ya. Next time you put a motherfucker in his place, have your facts straight.”
Pedro said, “You’re an asshole, Driver.”
Wolf added, “A damn Encyclopedia Brown.”
“You know? Walking around with his head filled with useless information.”
I flipped both of them off.
We all laughed, and that felt better than chicken soup. I’d had a rough day. I’d driven a rapper to do an interview at a hip-hop radio station on Wilshire, not far from the La Brea Tar Pits. A gangsta rapper who ain’t never been in a gang. He was buffed and hardcore, but rumors had been circulating