Carla was doing her lady-of-the-manor bit-but not being the least bit condescending-and there was a strawberry tort or blueberry buckle with whipped cream for dessert and then a couple of coffee brandies or Tia Maria and you just spilled your guts. Is that about how it went?”
“Something like that,” Vinnie whispered. His expression was three parts shame and two parts bullish hate.
“He started off by asking how Bart was. You said Bart was fine. He said Bart was a damned good man, but wouldn’t it be nice if he could pick his feet up a little on that Waterford deal. You said, it sure would. He said, By the way, how’s that going. You said, Well it really isn’t my department and he said, Don’t tell me, Vincent, you know what’s going on. And you said, All I know is that Bart hasn’t closed the deal yet. I heard that the Thom McAn people are interested in the site but maybe that’s just a rumor. Then he said, Well I’m sure Bart knows what he’s doing and you said, Yeah, sure and then you had another coffee brandy and he asked you if you thought the Mustangs would make the play-offs and then you and Sharon were going home and you know when you’ll be out there again, Vinnie?”
Vinnie didn’t say anything.
“You’ll be out there when Steve Ordner needs another snitch. That’s when.”
“I’m sorry,” Vinnie said sulkily. He started to get up.
“I’m not through.”
Vinnie sat down again and looked into the corner of the room with smoldering eyes.
“I was doing your job twelve years ago, do you know that? Twelve years, it probably seems like a long time to you. To me, I hardly know where the fuck the time went. But I remember the job well enough to know you like it. And that you do a good job. That reorganization in dry-cleaning, with the new numbering system . . . that was a masterpiece.”
Vinnie was staring at him, bewildered.
“I started in the laundry twenty years ago,” he said. “In 1953, I was twenty years old.
My wife and I were just married. I’d finished two years of business administration and Mary and I were going to wait, but we were using the interruption method, you see. We were going to town and somebody slammed the door downstairs and startled me right into an orgasm. She got pregnant out of it. So whenever I get feeling smart these days I just remind myself that one slammed door is responsible for me being where I am today.
It’s humbling. In those days there was no slick abortion law. When you got a girl pregnant, you married her or you ran out on her. End of options. I married her and took the first job I could get, which was here. Washroom helper, exactly the same job that Pollack kid is doing downstairs right this minute. Everything was manual in those days, and everything had to be pulled wet out of the washers and extracted in a big Stonington wringer that held five hundred pounds of wet flatwork. If you loaded it wrong, it would take your fucking foot off. Mary lost the baby in her seventh month and the doctor said she’d never have another one. I did the helper’s job for three years, and my average take-home for fifty-five hours was fifty-five dollars. Then Ralph Albert’s son, who was 135
the boss of the washroom in those days, got in a little fender-bender accident and died of a heart attack in the street while he and the other guy were exchanging insurance companies. He was a fine man. The whole laundry shut down the day of his funeral.
After he was decently buried, I went to Ray Tarkington and asked for his job. I was pretty sure I’d get it. I knew everything about how to wash, because Ralph had shown me.
“This was a family business in those days, Vinnie. Ray and his dad, Don Tarkington, ran it. Don got it from his father, who started the Blue Ribbon in 1926. It was a nonunion shop and I suppose the labor people would say all three of the Tarkingtons were paternalistic exploiters of the uneducated working man and woman. And they were.
But when Betty Keeson slipped on the wet floor and broke her arm, the Tarkingtons paid the hospital bill and there was ten bucks a week for food until she could come back. And every Christmas they put on a big dinner out in the marking-in room-the best chicken pies you ever ate, and cranberry jelly and rolls and your choice of chocolate or mince pudding for dessert. Don and Ray gave every woman a pair of earrings for Christmas and every man a brand-new tie. I’ve still got my nine ties in the closet at home. When Don Tarkington died in 1959, I wore one of them to his funeral. It was out of style and Mary gave me holy hell, but I wore it anyway. The place was dark and the bouts were long and the work was drudgery, but the people cared about you. If the extractor broke down, Don and Ray would be right down there with the rest of us, the sleeves of their white shirts rolled up, wringing out those sheets by hand. That’s what a family business was, Vinnie.
Something like that.
“So when Ralph died and Ray Tarkington said he’d already hired a guy from outside to run the washroom, I couldn’t understand what in hell was going on. And Ray says, My father and I want you to go back to college. And I say, Great, on what? Bus tokens? And he hands me a cashier’s check for two thousand dollars. I looked at it and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I say, What is this? And he says, It’s not enough, but it’ll get your tuition, your room, and your books. For the rest you work your summers here, okay? And I say, is there a way to thank you? And he says, yeah, three ways. First, repay the loan. Second, repay the in terest. Third, bring what you learn back to the Blue Ribbon. I took the check home and showed Mary and she cried. Put her hands right over her face and cried. ”
Vinnie was looking at him now with frank amazement.
“So in 1955 I went back to school and I got a degree in 1957. I went back to the laundry and Ray put me to work as boss of the drivers. Ninety dollars a week. When I paid the first installment on the loan, I asked Ray what the interest was going to run. He says, One percent. I said, What? He says, You heard me. Don’t you have something to do? So I say, Yeah I think I better go downtown and get a doctor up here to examine your head. Ray laughs like hell and tells me to get the fuck out of his office. I got the last of that money repaid in 1960, and do you know what, Vinnie? Ray gave me a watch. This watch.”
He shot his cuff and showed Vinnie the Bulova watch with its gold expansion band.
“He called it a deferred graduation present. Twenty dollars interest is what I paid on my education, and that son of a bitch turns around and gives me an eighty-buck watch.
Engraved on the back it says: Best from Don & Ray, The Blue Ribbon Laundry. Don was 136
already a year in his grave then.
“In 1963 Ray put me on your job, keeping an eye on dry-cleaning, opening new accounts, and running the Laundromat branches-only in those days there were just five instead of eleven. I stayed with that until 1967, and then Ray put me in this job here.
Then, four years ago, he had to sell. You know about that, the way the bastards put the squeeze on him. It turned him into an old man. So now we’re part of a corporation with two dozen other irons in the fire-fast food, Ponderosa golf, those three eyesore discount department stores, the gas stations, all that shit. And Steve Ordner’s nothing but a glorified foreman. There’s a board of directors somewhere in Chicago or Gary that spends maybe fifteen minutes a week on the Blue Ribbon operation. They don’t give a shit about running a laundry. They don’t know shit about it. They know how to read a cost accountant’s report, that’s what they know. The cost accountant says, Listen. They’re extending 784 through Westside and the Blue Ribbon is standing right in the way, along with half the residential district. And the directors say, Oh, is that right? How much are they allowing us on the property? And that’s it. Christ, if Don and Ray Tarkington were alive, they’d have those cheap highway department fucks in court with so many restraining orders on their heads that they wouldn’t get out from under until the year 2000. They’d go after them with a good sharp stick. Maybe they were a couple of buck–