Every Good Boy Does Fine, Part 2

Chapter Eleven

            A couple of months went by and the cops never came around so I didn’t have to use the lies I had come up with.  The cops know that if they are going to get you at all, they have to get you fast.  Otherwise, evidence disappears, memories become cloudy and you have time to make up a relatively foolproof alibi.

            I had decided not to involve Luis.  I could have just asked him to say that I left when he did.  That would have taken care of the whole problem because they would have believed him.  Since Luis had a reputation as an honest guy, they would have believed anything he said and he would only have to lie once to say that we left together.  It would have worked and Luis would have done it for me.  I had already covered for him a few times.  Not that he did any fooling around.

            Luis was one of the best family men I ever ran across.  He loved his wife and he would not have cheated on her and I know this because I saw him turn down several opportunities that most men could not have turned down.  There are plenty of girls between 138th Street and Fordham who see a guy with a job and right away they get ideas.  They think their futures are secure.  Luis wasn’t the best looking guy in the world and he was Spanish but he had his pick up there.

            What he liked to do was play dominoes.   Sometimes after work he’d stop off at this little place around Westchester and Prospect to drink some beer, play dominoes, listen to Super KQ and generally watch what was happening.  All I had to do was call up his wife and tell her that we had a couple of late deliveries to make and that he would be home as soon as he could.  That’s all there was to it and she liked to talk to me because I would try to speak Spanish with her.  Her English was as good as mine but she liked to hear a gringo trying to speak Spanish.  It was partly because she could see that I really liked the language and she knew that I liked Luis.  Maybe this was unusual to her.  It was also partly because she could do something that I couldn’t do and that always makes people feel good.

            Luis was a hard working, honest man.  That’s why he was still delivering furniture after eight years.  He would still be delivering furniture if I hadn’t came along.  Since I knew he was honest and I knew there weren’t too many like him, I moved him up the first chance I got.  I even helped him get out of the Bronx but most guys like him never run into nobody like me.  Luis got lucky.

            I didn’t involve him because I knew that if anything happened, it could be serious.  It was more serious than beating up a drunk even if the drunk was a cop’s brother-in-law.  They might consider what I did rape and they might take the woman’s word over mine because I knew she could afford a better lawyer than me.  If push came to shove and I ended up in court with her, I liked her chances better than mine.

            I considered using everyone else I knew as an alibi but I knew it was almost impossible for two people to tell the same lie.  It’s hard enough for one person to lie well enough to get away with it.  I even considered using Iris.  I figured she’d do it for me but then I’d be obligated to spend a few months with her and it didn’t seem worth it.

            So I just decided to say I stayed for some lemonade and then left after five minutes.  I knew that this was as good as an admission of guilt but it would have been her word against mine and they would have had no evidence to take me to court because I never hurt her.  I was still hoping she liked it enough to keep quiet about it.

            About three months later the cops showed up.  I don’t know why it took them so long but I got the impression somewhere along the line that they were trying to link me to some other crimes.  The cops like to close as many cases as they can when they think they got somebody.  Or maybe the woman started having bad dreams.

            Barry took them into his office in the back where they checked whatever delivery records Barry kept.  I guess they found out that me and Luis made a delivery there on the day in question.  They talked to Luis first and they must have figured they would get his story before I had a chance to nail down the details with him.  But if I had wanted to do that, there had already been plenty of time.  Maybe they waited so long figuring that if anybody made up any stories, they’d forget them.  Maybe the woman just decided to get even because of something else altogether.  I never found out nothin’ about that.

            Barry let them use his office to talk to me.  Two detectives spoke to me and two uniformed officers stood at the door.  I had never seen none of them before and I was glad of that.  I was glad they weren’t from the precinct the ones who had come to the bar were from.  They might have been more inclined to do whatever it took to bring me down.

            One of these guys was even Irish and I could see right away that when he saw me, he wasn’t taking it as serious as he might have.  That might have been because he knew it was a long shot.  Even if I was guilty as sin and everybody knew it, a case like this usually didn’t pay off from their point of view.  It was like a family argument.  They knew that half the time the woman was lying and half the time the man was lying and the one who was telling the truth was usually covering something up, too.  Either way the cops’ chances of getting anywhere weren’t so good and nine times out of ten, after everybody has a chance to let off a little steam, they’ll kiss and make up before they’ll put each other in jail.  It was like free marriage counseling.

            It wasn’t like that in my family but I saw it all over the place.  Johnny’s brother got into arguments so many times with his woman the cops probably learned to recognize her voice over the phone.  They’d go over there just so she could curse Johnny’s brother out in front of somebody and by the time she was finished, they were apologizing to the cops and telling them it wasn’t going to happen again and saying that what really happened was she knocked her face against the refrigerator door.  I mean, there was evidence all over the place and the cops never did nothin’.

            In this case there wasn’t no evidence at all.  The Irish cop knew it.  I could tell by the look on his face and the tone of his voice.  The other detective was Italian and didn’t seem to care one way or another about the case.  I guess he’d seen too many complaints about rape that just turned out to be somebody getting back at their boyfriend.  Or maybe what he heard just sounded like the way he treated his own women.  I’ve seen that plenty of times, too, and not just up in the Bronx or among the Italians.  There’s plenty right here on the upper east side where everyone is supposed to be civilized.

            “You George O’Reilly?” the Irish cop said.  He did all the talking.

            “Yeah.”

            “We got a complaint against you from a woman up in Kingsbridge.  Do you have any idea who this might be?”

            “No, detective, this is the first I heard of it.”

            “We’ve already checked the delivery schedule and so we know you were up there with a fellow named Luis Arguello.  You delivered a bedroom to the individual who is making the complaint.”

            They showed me the schedule and then I told them I remembered it but not very well.  “Yeah, I remember that,” I said.  “What’s the complaint?”

            “The woman says you forcibly had sexual intercourse with her.”

            “What!”  I looked him in the eye.

            “Can you just tell us everything you remember about that particular delivery, Mr. O’Reilly.”

            “Am I under arrest, detective?” I asked.

            “No, sir, you are not under arrest.  You are not even a suspect because we’re just trying to determine if any misconduct has taken place or not.  All we’re trying to do is gather the facts of the case.  That’s all.”

            I could sense from the tone of his voice that he was on my side and so I knew the best thing I could do was cooperate.  I could have raised a fuss and told them to tell me my rights and called somebody who I would have said was my lawyer but I could see that the law was on my side because the cop was on my side.  This was one of my first lessons in working with the law.

            I learned later that there are a lot of ways to break the law without breaking it.  In fact, the law is set up for people who know how to break it.  It’s set up by people who know how to break it.  It’s only the honest, hard working people who try to obey it.  The people who set it up never imagine that it’s something that would apply to them.  Figuring this out was as important as realizing that success and hard work don’t mix or learning to lie to somebody’s face.  I didn’t know it at the time but I was taking a big step toward success that day and it wasn’t something they taught you at City College.

            “Well, we made a delivery up to this place,” I said, “and it was just like any other delivery.”

            “What time of day did you make this delivery?”

            “I think it must have been about six o’clock.”

            “In the evening?”

            “Yeah.”

            “What did you deliver?”

            “A bedroom.”

            “How long did that take?”

            “An hour.”

            “Did the individual you were delivering to ask you to do anything for her?”

            “She had us move the furniture around a couple of times.”

            “You mean rearrange it?”

            “Yeah.”

            “What happened then?”

            I wasn’t going to tell them any more than necessary but I wanted to look like I was cooperating and I knew that they had already talked to Luis.  I figured he had told them he left first because as far as he knew, nothing happened.  He didn’t know nothing about it and would have told the truth.  If the cops believed him, they were probably going to believe me.  It would of been hard for them to believe that I did it and then didn’t tell nobody about it.  Experience would have taught them that human nature wasn’t like that but then I wasn’t like your everyday rapist.  I was different.

            A lot of guys would have bragged.  A lot of guys would have bragged whether it happened or not.  In fact, they would have bragged loudest if nothing happened, but most guys would have let their partners in on something like this.  They couldn’t have kept their mouths shut.

            I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it.  It’s just stupid to go around talking about something like this when it could come back to get you one day.  I hadn’t said nothing to nobody about it and so I knew that Luis had told the truth.  I also knew that the only way they could have found out about it was from the woman herself, unless there was somebody hiding in the closet that I never saw or heard and that was unlikely.  If somebody had been watching, they wouldn’t have let me get away with it.  Either they would have stepped in right there or they would have been a witness and would have went to the cops right away.  Since I kept my mouth shut, I knew there wasn’t nobody else involved but her and me.

            “She invited me to stay for some lemonade.”

            I thought I’d leave Luis out of it altogether and make it look exactly like it was as much as possible.  I hadn’t really done nothing wrong.  It was me she had been looking at the whole time and the only reason she invited us to stay was so I would.

            This was the truth but the cops must have been surprised by my story.  I mean, if I was lying when I said I didn’t do it, why wouldn’t I lie about staying for the lemonade?  It would have been just as easy to say I didn’t drink no lemonade or touch her as to say I drank lemonade but then I didn’t touch her.  It would have been easier and more believable but it was another snap decision and it came out good for me.  I was always lucky like that.

            “She invited you?”

            “That’s right.”

            “She didn’t invite Arguello?”

            “No.”

            “What did you do, Mr. O’Reilly?”  There was a smirk on his face when he said this and on the one hand I knew that it meant he understood.  But I also knew that he would only understand as long as I didn’t give them nothing to go on.  If I gave them something to go on, he would have been forced to do his job, which was to take me in and get me off the street.  I wasn’t no threat to nobody but that was how he would have been forced to view it.

            “I stayed for some lemonade.”  I said this as humorlessly as possible and it’s easy to be humorless with the cops.  It sounds kind of funny now when I play that back and listen to it and I know that if Marvin could hear it, he’d be laughing out loud but there wasn’t nothin’ funny about it.  A lot of guys laugh at this stuff and that’s why a lot of them are dead or at Rikers.  They thought this kind of stuff was funny.

            “How long did you stay?”

            “Five minutes.”

            “Where were you during this five minutes?”

            “In the kitchen.”

            “You were in the kitchen alone with the woman?”

            “Yeah.”

            “For five minutes drinking lemonade?”

            “That’s right.”

            “Then what happened?”

            “I finished the lemonade and left.”

            “What time was this?”

            “About a quarter after seven.”

            “Did you say anything to her before you left?”

            “No.”

            “You just drank the lemonade and left?”

            “That’s right.”  I was looking him in the eye the whole time.

            “How did you leave, Mr. O’Reilly?”

            “I went down the elevator.”

            “Did you see anyone at that time, when you were leaving?”

            “No.”

            “No one in the lobby on your way out?”

            “No.”  He was just giving me an opportunity to trip myself up.  Anything I could have said here would have got me in trouble.  When he saw the way I was answering, he knew I knew what he was doing.

            “Then what did you do once you were outside the building?”

            “I walked over to Jerome Avenue to get on the train.”  I knew the Kingsbridge stop well enough so that they couldn’t have tripped me up on nothin’ about that.  They didn’t even try.  I had been up and down the Woodlawn line so many times I could have told them any number of believable things.  Like the time I was sitting on the 4 train when a guy sits down beside me with a big snake around his waist, a boa constrictor and that was right there at Kingsbridge or Mosholu.  They knew that was a dead end and didn’t pursue it.

            “You didn’t go back there?”

            “No.”

            “Have you ever been back to that apartment?”

            “No.”

            Now he looked at me with a straight face.  “Just one more thing, Mr. O’Reilly.  Did you ever touch that woman?”

            I never blinked.  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

            He closed his notebook.  “All right.  That’s all for now.  If you’re telling the truth, Mr. O’Reilly, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

            They left as business-like as they came.  The truth is that the cops are just a branch of the business community.  Most businesses have security guards around and the business community has the police around making sure nobody tries to upset things.  Most people don’t ask who they serve and protect because they think they know but it’s just another case of things being the opposite of how they seem and it ain’t no coincidence.

            Once you get into the business community, you realize that the laws are made for you and the police are there to enforce those laws so that you can go on conducting business as usual, whether that’s dumping an automobile stock before a big recall, investing in foreign companies with government guarantees, which is a scam almost on a scale with the insurance business, or dealing cocaine in certain areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan.  It’s all business as usual.

            You can divide all laws into two groups - those that deal with money and those that don’t.  Most people think that the important laws are the ones that don’t have nothing to do with money.  These are laws about murder, rape, burglary, larceny, grand theft, personal injury, libel, slander, abortions, praying in public schools, smoking in restaurants and so on.  These laws are set up to keep honest, hard working people behaving in a more or less civilized way.

            Businessmen and politicians know that the only laws that matter are the money laws.  A businessman is someone who has figured out that it’s the money laws that matter.  All the other laws about doing right and wrong don’t have nothing to do with business.

            Money laws are set up so that the people in the business community can do whatever they want.  They say that business has to come first because without business nobody would have no job and there is some truth to that except in places like the Bronx where thirty or forty percent of the people don’t have no job anyway and most of them would be honest and hard working if they could be.  What they don’t tell you is that the whole thing is just another insurance scam.

            All businesses operate the same.  They figure how much it’s going to cost to make their product or provide their service.  Then they calculate a nice profit - four or five hundred percent and sometimes more - and sell at a price that will give them that profit.  Profits never drop for the owners of the companies.  If revenue dips, they start cutting corners.  They lay off people or they cut salaries or take away benefits but profits never drop and the reason they can get away with this is because money laws are set up so that they can do whatever they have to do to keep the profits up.  Even if they have to move to Brazil and put a hundred people out on the street, that’s what they’ll do and that’s what the law will help them do.

            What is stealing to an honest, hard working man is good business to a businessman or politician because the two sets of laws don’t have nothing to do with each other.  That’s why a politician can fly to Hawaii any time he wants to and nobody calls him a crook.  Businessmen do the same thing except that instead of getting the money from your taxes, they get it by charging you even more for what they’re selling you.

            One of the questions they won’t let you ask is: just exactly where do these profits come from?  This isn’t something that’s talked about at City College either and that’s because they know where it comes from.  If it takes ten dollars to produce something that is sold for twenty dollars, where does that extra ten dollars come from?  Who can afford to pay twice what something is worth?  How do you get your hands on enough money to be able to pay twice what something is worth?  When we were sitting around with nothing to do, asking these questions, we thought there were answers.  We thought there was a good reason why most things cost more money than we had.  Most people still think so and most people can’t afford much.

            I learned all of this from watching Barry and it was the reason I had decided to go back to City College and take some more math and economics and business classes.  I could already see how it was done but I thought a little instruction in the details of the operation wouldn’t hurt.  Barry was a more hands-on owner than the old Jew who owned the Irish bar and I admired him for that.  I figured it was best to keep a close eye on your business and on the people you had working for you.  That’s as important as keeping your mouth shut.

            But Barry was waiting for me the next morning and the way he slammed the door, I could see he wasn’t too happy.

            “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

            “What?”

            “I told you not to fool around with the customers, didn’t I?”

            “Yeah.  So?”

            “So you’re through, O’Reilly.  I don’t know if the cops are going to get you or not but you’re through here.  If I can help them, I will because it’ll get you out of my hair once and for all.”

            He was screaming without making too much noise because Luis was drinking coffee out front but I stayed calm.  “Barry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I didn’t do nothing.”

            “You mean the cops came here for nothing.”

            “I don’t know why they came here but I didn’t do nothing.  I thought you knew me better than that.”  Of course, he didn’t know nothing about me or anybody else that worked for him, even if he liked to pretend he did.  I figured it might make him feel better if I reminded him of something he liked to think about himself.

            “You didn’t rape that woman?”

            “No!  Are you crazy?  Why would I do something like that, Barry?  Why would I go and risk my job and everything else?  That would be stupid.”

            “I know Luis left you there and I know the cops wouldn’t come here unless they had some good reason.  The last thing I need is for cops to be coming around here and I told you that O’Reilly.  I told you that a hundred times.”

            I could see that he was serious.  He was firing me.  He didn’t care if I was guilty or not.  I might have been able to convince him I wasn’t but he just didn’t want to be involved with the cops any more than he had to and I understood that.

            But I saw that he was somebody who didn’t think and that explained something that I had been wondering about ever since I started working there.  That explained why he still had only one store on Third Avenue in the Bronx.  The first time I saw the kind of cash that was flowing through that place, I wondered what was going on.  All he had to do to double it was open up another store and there were plenty of places to do it but Barry didn’t think.

            For example, if he really thought I was a rapist, then he wouldn’t have been standing there screaming at me that way.  If I was a rapist, I would have been capable of taking the gun out of the drawer where I knew he kept it and shutting him up but Barry didn’t think of that.

            He was scared and that’s a mistake a lot of guys make.  That’s why Barry was destined to fail as a businessman.  He never thought about how things really work because he was scared.  He was too scared to open up another store.  He just wanted things to go on the way they always had.  He didn’t want to do nothing to upset the basket but he didn’t know another basic rule of business.  If you’re not getting bigger, you’re getting smaller.  Eventually you’ll disappear.

            “You think I like the cops coming around?” I said.

            “I guess you do but I’m not going to let you ruin my business.  You’re through here as soon as I can find another delivery man.”

            “You mean you’re firing me and you want me to keep on working until you find somebody else to take my job?”

            “I’m giving you fair notice.”

            He was stupider than I thought.  If you’re going to fire somebody, you better fire them and get it over with.  You don’t want somebody that unhappy involved with your business and you didn’t have to take no business class to figure that out.

            “Let me ask you something,” I said.  “How did a stupid son-of-a-bitch like you get his hands on a business like this in the first place?”

            That’s when he lost control and came at me with his bare hands.  I must have touched a nerve.  It was no different from when Marvin beat that paddle ball king or from looking at a jealous guy’s girl on the subway.  If you say the right thing, you can switch them onto automatic.

            I knew that his old man had started the business forty years before and had built it up.  I also knew that he had turned it over to Barry about the time that part of the Bronx was being turned over to the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and that Barry didn’t like it.  He was happy to make a living there but he didn’t like it.  He was just too dumb to figure out what to do.

            All it takes is a word and sometimes it don’t even take that.  You can make somebody lose control by saying the right thing easier than by punching him in the mouth.  In a lot of cases a look or a gesture will do more damage than a violent act.  Barry knew he was stupid and that was why he didn’t like hearing it from somebody like me.

            He was about my height and thirty pounds heavier but I pushed him back with no trouble.  He was twice my age and didn’t spend all day carrying furniture up and down stairs.

            “I’ll keep working for you, Barry,” I said, “but you’re going to have to pay me a hell of a lot more than you’re paying me right now.  Those deliveries got to be made and Luis can’t do it all by himself.”

            I was just joking around when I said this.  I had already decided to leave as soon as I got done telling Barry everything I had to tell him.  I couldn’t believe that he would think somebody would keep working for him after he fired them.

            I said the first figure that came to my head.  “How about a hundred dollars a day, Barry.  Those sofa-beds are heavy sons-of-bitches.  You can’t expect somebody to carry them around for nothing, especially after they been fired.”

            He got up and came at me again.  I threw him down onto the desk this time and put my hand on his throat.  I’d say that he didn’t expect this because it’s true but it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had expected it.  He was out of control.

            I didn’t mind losing the job but I was thinking about the money.  I had got used to being paid every week and I didn’t like the idea of not having any money, even if it was just for a while.  By this time I was paying half the rent at home and I didn’t want to give my old man any excuse to get on my case again.  He was real quiet as long as the money was coming in.  I was thinking of getting my own place anyway and I needed a steady income for that.

            “Well, Barry,” I said, “do you still want me to keep on working for you?”

            This was when I noticed the letter opener on the desk beside his ear.  I picked it up and touched the point right on the tip of his nose and that’s when I saw the fear come into his eyes.  Before there hadn’t been nothing in his eyes and this is usually how it is when a guys goes out of control.  There’s nothing there.  They’re like pit bulls when they got something between their jaws.  Now I could see he was scared and I liked it.

            He stopped struggling and just looked up at me with this terrified look on his face.  Maybe he realized then that if I was a rapist, I might be a murderer, too, and if I was, he shouldn’t have come on me the way he did but I don’t think he thought enough for that.  He just didn’t like the idea of having a letter opener pressed into his nose.  That’s all.

            “You want me to keep taking them bedroom sets up to those pretty little housewives who don’t have nothing to do all day long but wait for delivery boys?” I said just to keep that look in his eyes a little longer.  I wasn’t no rapist or murderer but he didn’t know that.  He didn’t know that for sure and he must have been having some doubts about it at that moment.  “Is that what you want?”

            I had said pretty much everything I had to say except one good, last good bye.  Barry was trying to say something but I couldn’t understand it so I let go of his throat and stood up with the letter opener in my hand.

            “George, wait,” he said.  “Don’t get so crazy.  Of course, I want you to keep working for me.”  He got up from the desk and backed away from me.

            “Too late, Barry,” I said.  “I quit.”

            “Wait, George, listen to me.  I didn’t mean most of what I said there.  I was just pissed off because the cops were snooping around.  That’s all.  I know you didn’t do nothing.”

            I had already decided that I didn’t need the job anymore but I was willing to reconsider because I needed the money.  So I listened to what he had to say.

            “You’re right, George,” he said.  “You should be making more money.  I can’t pay my delivery men any more than I’m already paying them but that’s not the problem.  You know as well as I do that I can find somebody who wants to make four-fifty an hour real easy.  That’s not what I’m talking about.”

            It don’t sound like nothing now but it was money to me at the time.  I was taking home a hundred twenty a week and I was worried about losing it.  If I had realized then how fast and easy it was going to be, I wouldn’t have worried about a thing.

            “What are you talking about, Barry?”

            “I want you to manage the store.”

            I looked into his eyes to try to see what was behind this but I couldn’t make anything out.  There wasn’t no store manager at the time.  That’s why Barry was there every day and maybe he was thinking of spending less time there himself.  That made sense but I couldn’t see at first why he would pick me to manage for him.  It took me a minute to figure out why he would do it just then.

            “Manage the store?” I said to give myself some time to consider the situation.  “Weren’t you firing me a minute ago?”

            “I told you.  I didn’t mean that.  Let’s forget about that.  It’s all over.  It’s all in the past now.  I know you didn’t do none of that.  If I thought you did, would I be promoting you now?”

            That was the question I was trying to consider.  The obvious answer was no, but I’ve noticed that in matters like this, the opposite of the obvious is usually the case.  It’s like thinking that we have laws for the good of the people.

            “I need somebody I can trust to manage this place for me, George.  I’ve spent every day of my life for the last twenty-five years in this store and I want to start spending some time with my family.  I don’t want to make the same mistake with Evelyn that I made with Holly.  I need somebody I can trust.”

            Holly was his second wife and the mother of two of his kids.  I guess he was trying to imply that if he had spent more time with them, they would never have been divorced.  From what Luis had told me, though, Holly would have been happy to never see him at all and Evelyn felt the same way.  What he was really talking about was spending more time with Rosie, his girlfriend up on 163rd Street.  He didn’t like to see the Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood but Rosie was another story.

            What I was thinking about, though, was why he thought he could trust me all of a sudden.  I mean, why would you start telling somebody who had just threatened your life with a pointed instrument that you can trust them and you want them to manage your business?  That’s when I remembered the old Jew and things started to fall into place.

            I thought the old Jew had rewarded me for doing something good for the business.  Actually, there was no difference between what he had done and what Barry was doing right now.  They were both scared of me and fear is the one thing they respect.

            Actually, fear is respect to people who don’t think.  Respect is fear.  I realized right there that by putting that look of terror in Barry’s eyes, what I really did was teach him to respect me.  Maybe he decided there on the desk that I was a murderer and a rapist after all and that that was just the kind of person he needed to run his store.

            If that’s what he thought, he was right.  If you’re going to be successful in business, you better be prepared to rape and murder because that is what it takes and that is what they do every day.  It was like having sex.  If you're going to do it, you better be prepared to abandon the baby that might come out of it.  That’s just the way things are.

            “How much?” I said.

            “Sixty dollars a day.  That’s a lot of money, George, but you’ll have to work for it.”

            “A hundred.”  I thought sixty a day was good money.  It was good money but since a minute before I had resigned myself to unemployment for the immediate future, I had nothing to lose.

            “Now, George, let’s be reasonable.  I’ve got expenses.  It takes money to run a business.”

            I had already been thinking about that.  There were four full time delivery men, two trucks and a van that Barry used to go up to see Rosie because he didn’t want to drive his Mercedes up there.  There was the store rent, five full time salesmen and three part time, Gloria, who took care of the cash register and the credit card sales.

            Then there were two full time security guards, a part time kid to run messages and get coffee, insurance on the inventory and whatever capital he had invested in inventory.  The advertising expense was small - mostly printing up some fliers and getting a school kid or a drunk to hand them out on the street.  Once in a while he’d run something bigger in the Daily News.

            I thought I had it all figured out already but I hadn’t discussed this with nobody.  I was just trying to learn the operation on my own.  I had even made some friends with some of the furniture suppliers because I thought there might be a better job for me in there somewhere.  It never hurts to act friendly with businessmen.  That’s what they expect even if they know it don’t mean nothing.

            “I’ll give you seventy-five,” he said.

            “Eighty.”

            “That’s why I want you here, George,” he said.  “You drive a hard bargain.  All right, eighty dollars a day but you got to be here seven days a week.  I’m still going to be here every day but if things go smooth, I’ll be able to come in a little late in the morning once in a while.  See what I mean?”

            What he meant was that he would have more time to spend with Rosie and I figured that sooner or later this was going to get him into some kind of hot water, especially if he would go so far as to hire a store manager at eighty dollars a day just for her sake.  That was an eighty dollar a day expense he never had before and it told me something right there - about the business and about Rosie and about Barry.

            “Yeah,” I said.  “I see what you mean,” and I put down the letter opener and shook his hand.

            The first thing I did was go over the books.  The second thing I did was promote Gloria to book keeper.  She still did everything she was doing before but now she could help me with the book keeping.  I gave her a twenty cent an hour raise because I knew she already liked me and this way she would like me more.  She’d like me enough to do pretty much anything I asked her to do and that was exactly where I wanted her.

            I didn’t tell Barry about the raise.  I didn’t tell him about the promotion either and after a few weeks, when everything was running smooth, I didn’t have to tell him much of anything except that there was plenty of petty cash in the safe and his monthly parking was paid up.  As long as I showed him all the sales receipts and showed him that all the bills were paid, he was happy.

            I was happy because now I was paying the whole rent myself and giving my mother some money on the side.  My old man was happy because he had more money to keep to himself and my sister was happy because the rest of us were and she had a guy who said he wanted to marry her and move to Jersey City.  I started looking seriously for a place of my own.

            Everything was running smooth.  In fact, sales were up.  I hired Marvin part time to do some of the deliveries I used to do and he and Luis got along fine.  They’d even stop off to play dominoes together and I can imagine some of the stories Marvin would have told Luis’s wife.  By “part time” I mean that he worked full time most of the time but if he needed to take a few days or a couple of weeks, we worked something out and so it ended up being part time.  I also gave twenty cent raises to both security guards.  I didn’t know how long it would keep them happy but I knew it would keep them happy for a while.  They might even think I was doing better by them than Barry ever had and that was okay with me.

            I told Barry about this one and explained that there wasn't anything more important in that area than security.  That was true and he went along with it.  He had had plenty of problems with security guards giving their notice by hauling out furniture over night.  It wasn’t much different from severance pay.

            I spent every day at the store and learned every detail of the business in six months.  Barry spent more and more time with Rosie.  I started staying late with Gloria on Saturday nights.  She wasn’t as good looking as Iris but I liked her better.  I liked her enough that I probably would have spent time with her anyway.  What she did for me in the office after hours was just a bonus to being friends with her.

            It was a good time and I’d wish I could go back to it now but what would be the point?  It would still just lead me to where I am now.  Even if I was happy then, it still wouldn’t mean nothing.  It would just mean that I was still a few years away from here.