and squeezed onto the sponge enough Palmolive to wash a car. I peeked over my shoulder at her. An unlit smoke swung from her bottom lip.
“Can I bum one of those?”
She tapped the top of the pack against the instep of her hand. A low-pitched clang signaled the end of Richie’s shower. She lit two cigarettes and fixed one in the ashtray so its filter pointed to the empty seat across from her. A bottle of Wild Turkey that had been half-empty the previous evening was now completely empty. I poured myself what was left of the coffee and took a seat.
“So you’re the roommate,” she said.
“So I’m the roommate.”
She said her name was Josie—or at least that was the name she went by because she hated her real name.
“How bad can it be?”
“Pretty bad.”
Richie screamed through the last line of the song three times until he got it just right. Then he started coughing violently.
“Yup, he’s a real trip, all right,” I said with an astonishment-veneered pride.
“Oh, I’m discovering that pretty quick.”
A portable turntable hi-fi unit from the seventies sat on a filing cabinet next to the table. A record was still spinning from the night before. I yanked the cord from the wall socket and stopped the record with the fat of my fist.
“Do you know this record?” I picked up the jacket to Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left.
“I didn’t until last night. This morning, technically.” She touched her face nervously, aware she’d revealed too much.
“What did you think of it? Pretty great, no?”
“Oh, my God, yes. I can’t believe I’d never heard of him.”
“Nobody has. They never will because the music business is fucked.” Everything I knew about how fucked up the music business was came from a story about Fugazi I’d skimmed in Magnet.
“Suicide, right?”
“Pills,” I said.
“That’s how I’d do it.”
“Depends on the pills. Imagine trying to overdose on speed.” I’d taken speed exactly zero times, but I was talking like speed and me were old adversaries.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t do drugs.”
Smooth move, Ex-Lax.
“Can I have a look at that?” she asked. I handed her the record jacket. There was a hickey close to her elbow. She touched each title as she read it. “‘River Man.’ That song is so spooky. We listened to it like fifty times in a row.”
“I know, right? The way the strings start out so legato.” I let the word legato hang out there to lure her into asking me if I was musician. She didn’t bite.
“Totally spooky,” she said. Then she did something horrible. She started to scat to her tone-deafened interpretation of the melody to “River Man.” It was chilling in its unqualified and grotesque sincerity. And it went on too long. She finally grabbed her hair in frustration, as if the song she couldn’t get out of her head were “Dancing on the Ceiling” or anything by Mike and the Mechanics.
Richie breezed into the kitchen, still buttoning up his Esposito’s embroidered white oxford. He growled like a he-man when he saw Josie. He pulled her to her feet by her belt buckle and kissed her hard before she could protest. Then she was all his.
“Mmmmmmm,” they moaned in unison, like they were eating from the neck of the same caribou. While they kissed, Richie’s hands moved up the back of her bare thighs and disappeared in the leg openings of her cut-off shorts. He grabbed two handfuls of ass and lifted her off her feet. She locked her legs around him. The whole scene was fucking gross. I tilted my chair back like a bored chain-smoking sixth-grader.
“Should I leave?”
They peeled apart like the halves of a developing Polaroid photo about to reveal the image of two infatuated people fucking.
“I’m the one who has to leave,” Richie said, all lovey- dovey, still staring into Josie’s eyes. I thought he was going to call her Poopsie or Snuggle Buns. “The wop’s got a hair across his ass for me because two of my tables sent their braciole back last night.”
“Stupid braciole,” Josie said like a disappointed kindergartner.
Richie snorted and stared menacingly at her. “But I’ll see you later,” he said, and went for her belt again. She tried to elude him with some over-the-top dance steps. She was an all-too-willing participant in the embarrassing theater of it.
“Unhand me, you brute. I’ll cry rape.” She swatted the air with Five Leaves Left. “Back! Back!” she said like a lion trainer.
Richie got serious. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s an original Hannibal Records