THE X DAMES
CHAPTER ONE: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
Lucy happened to be standing in the kitchen staring at the main event, a semi-defrosted package of sliced turkey breast, when Harry called at nearly five pm--unforgiveably late as usual--to make excuses for not making it to dinner that night, voice crackling through a cell phone from somewhere in the vicinity of Caracas, Venezuela. Or so he claimed. Before she could hang up on him he got his story going and she had to admit it was a good one. It seems, he told her, that these two dope guys he knew from his bad old days in Provincetown once upon a time had buried a million in cocaine-generated cash in heavy-duty plastic bags exactly one hundred twenty meters due north of the northeast corner of a gas station on the edge of a small town called Snake Creek, near the northern edge of the Everglades National Park. So they'd told him, years back.
The first guy had his head blown off in a dope-related shoot-out on a Bahama islet on New Year's Eve in 1999, and now Harry's sources had the second guy dead, heart stopped by a self-injected speedball sitting with the shades drawn, mid-day in a West Hollywood apartment. A miserable fate for a guy pushing sixty, Harry noted; but in any case, he went on, they'd told him about the stash of cash at least ten years ago, when he was in transition from bad boy to good cop, and at the time they'd both insisted, should they bite the dust, that no else knew and he should help himself to the money when the statute of limitations ran out. Now they were dead and it had. Harry didn't see a whole lot of excess moral weight attached to the bags of cash, and so--"Harry, that's enough," Lucy said. "Just cut me ten per cent for stress and suffering when you dig it up."
"No problem, Luce," he said. "I could even go twelve. But there's more. Because once I was there, in Florida I mean, guess what? Or should I say guess who," he added, intriguingly, "Got me from Florida to Venezuela?" He paused. "Do the initials MV ring any chimes?"
"MV?" Lucy pondered. A truck squalled downstairs, gridlocked. "God, I've got to get out of here," she said. "I'm going utterly insane." A light dawned. "Maria Verde? You're after Maria Verde?"
"Was," Harry said, disappointment surfacing. "There was a reported sighting. I was in Florida to organize my dig-unfortunately the gas station is gone, in fact the tire department of a Walmart appears to be positioned precisely atop the spot where the cash is supposedly buried, so I think it might stay buried for a while yet-when my amigo Rogelio el Camaron-"
"Roger the Shrimp?" Lucy said. "This is a guy you never mentioned before."
"He is possessed, they say, of the largest tool in Latin America."
"And proud of it no doubt."
"He used to be a cop. Now he's a porn star, hefting the heaviest wood south of the Rio Grande. But he's always done right by me, from way back when. And naturally I had redflagged that psycho-bitch, right after Jamaica. So Roger called to inform me that a person looking very much like our Maria recently had been seen on a plane headed out of Rio bound for Caracas. There was even video footage from an airport security camera. I saw it, and I do believe it was possibly her, although the shades and hair were very large. So I zipped down, only to find the trail gone cold. But here I am."
"Yes, there you are," said Lucy. "And here I am, not liking the thought of Maria Verde one bit, and wondering who's going to help me eat the three pounds of turkey fajitas I planned on cooking."
"Your friend Mickey seems to have a reliable appetite," Harry said.
"That's true-or was true, anyways, until she recently started taking anti-depressants and went on a crash and burn diet."
"Mickey on a diet! You're kidding!"
"Her butt had gotten epic, Harry. And now the girl has lost 27 pounds. Some kind of South Beach meets Atkins meets Weight Watchers in hell. She's on drugs, plus she met a guy and got inspired. No booze, no carbs, no fat, no fun, God the forbidden list is endless. She's not good company right now, to tell the truth. I think when she hits 140 or so she'll start eating again. Or if he dumps her like the usual suspects usually do. Meanwhile--"
"Hey, sorry, Luce. Really. Trust me. I am not in Venezuela because I want to be."
"Sure, Harry. I'll share dinner with the dog." She sighed. "At least he's reliable."
"What can I say, it's--"
"I know, I know, not your fault. Listen, call me when you get back. I gotta go."
"Later Luce." He hung up. She clicked off and almost threw the phone. Damn that guy. Why did she still see him, when she never knew when she'd see him again?
The word for this moment was--whatever. She poked the turkey breast. It hadn't really defrosted. She shoved it back in the freezer, bagged all the neatly sliced and diced vegetables and put them in the refrigerator, stuck her cell phone in her purse, then took off her sexy black translucent lounging jammies and put on a pair of modified homeboy street pants, cut to ride high because Lucy was decidedly not into butt cleavage or pubic hairstyling. She added a neo-hippie beaded top, a little black sweater, her black cat's eye glasses, and open-toed sandals, for the late April breeze wafting in the windows carried early hints of summer. She woke the sleeping poodle with a "Yo, Claud, wanna hit it?" He leaped up and scrambled for the door. She checked make-up, brushed her currently medium-long blond hair back, did lipstick, grabbed leash and purse and headed out, not forgetting to lock the door.
She tripped five flights down-the elevator had been out of commission for a month-and out the building door onto her beloved, kinetic, once-funky Broadway, transformed, before her very eyes, from downscale shopping paradise to streetfront shopping mall. Pseudo-hip corporate retail stores lined the street on both sides, in both directions, as far as her eye could see. Chasing after trendiness by moving into SoHo, these enterprises ended up chasing the trendies right out of the neighborhood. But that had been going on downtown long before Lucy Ripken had moved in, and she knew it was the inevitable evolution of the city. If bands of murderous, airplane-hijacking suicidal terrorists couldn't change the economic dynamic, no one could. And they had failed, thank God. But still, the damned street used to have some soul, or at least some cheap places to buy clothing and food, and now it was ruled by corporate retail.
She leashed the big white poodle, quite dashing with his newly-shorn spring hair and his brilliant brown eyes, and walked west on Broome, then north on Wooster and west on Spring, dodging the packs of irksome wannabe hipsters and overdressed Eurotrash shoppers and noisy New Jersey noshers and the occasional, haunted-looking longtime SoHo resident, belatedly maneuvering baby- and grocery-packed stroller home through the once serene, dignified blocks. Lucy was headed for the sylvan banks of the Hudson, and on the way she emptied herself of all the things that currently worried her: Harry, the demise of her neighborhood, the flatlining sales of her Mexican book, the state of the union and the world. A girl could go nuts pondering the last, she thought, then let it go as a warm breeze rippled over from the river. On the other hand she couldn't quite let go of the image of Maria Verde, with her cock-eyed kewpie doll grin, snarling in Jamaican moonlight as she pointed a gun at Lucy's heart. Lucy had been maybe ten seconds from dead when Harry's "associate" Prudence Fallowsmith, Jamaican cop, had tackled the raving, gun-toting bitch, saving Lucy's life. Maria Verde, whose drug deal Lucy and Harry had foiled, disappeared up the beach and that was the last Lucy had seen or heard of her until today. They had stopped the drug deal, but still, Maria Verde had gotten away with murder.
In the soft spring evening, with traffic hushed to a white roar, and the crowds of SoHo now behind her, Lucy let Maria Verde go as well.
Soon she crossed the Westside Highway, and turned south on the ped and bike path. Forty minutes from her noisy front door, she settled on a bench under the lush green trees of Battery Park City. She gazed out, watching boats slide up and down the river as the lights of Jersey City rose before her.
As she considered what to do about dinner, and Claud lazily chased the odd squirrel, and children played amidst the quirky bestiary of miniature statues in the park, she loved New York again for a minute. Then her cell phone rang, an organ riff snatched from an ancient Los Lobos song, Kiko and the Lavender Moon. She quickly fished it out of her purse and flipped it open. "Lucy here."
"That would be Lucy Ripken?"
"Yeah. Who's calling?" A female, didn't sound like a telemarketer but you never knew.
"Hey chill out. It's me. Terry. Teresa MacDonald, you paranoid dame."
"Terry! Hey!" Terry lived in LA, wrote art criticism, had dated eccentric art world celebs for years, and ranked among the smartest people Lucy knew. A still-skinny reformed anorexic, red-haired, athletic, neurotic as hell but loads of fun. They'd met when Lucy did a piece for an LA magazine called SCRUB, devoted to bathing arcana, that had a moment of trendy glory and then went down the drain when the publisher made the mistake of moving the operation to New York, where the sharks made short work of it. Terry had been the Culture Editor in SCRUB's glory years. Year. SCRUB was a short-lived phenom. Lucy had the complete set of back issues in a small box stuck in the depths of her closet. But she and Terry had stayed friendly. "What's up, girl?"
"Not too much. Still working on Milton Schamberg."
"God, how's that going?" A few years ago Terry had started on an exhaustive biography of an obscure mid-20th century Southern California painter whom she decided had played a far larger role in the cultural evolution of Los Angeles than anyone knew. It was taking forever.
"I'm into his thirties, so..."
"Since he died at 44 you must be close."
"But the good parts are still to come."
"Right. The sixties and all that. Have you managed to get anyone to underwrite you yet?"
"Grants are fewer and farther between than ever, especially in publishing, so the short answer is no. But--and this is why I'm calling you, Lucy. I've been scrambling for money as usual, and thanks to Milton's son-"
"His son?"
"He's a Hollywood guy. In his forties--or fifties. Who can tell around here? Anyway he's a sick fuck but connected. So anyways I've got an interesting offer, and as soon as I heard it I thought of you."
"Really? What's the deal?"
"What do you think of when I say X Dames?"
"X Dames? Um--pompous porn stars?"
"No, you goon. Don't you know about the X Games?"
"Sure. That's like radical skateboarding, right?"
"And snowboarding, surfing, mountain biking, kite-sailing-all those crazy sports that started in Southern California and are now taking over the world. At least those parts wired for cable."
"So--"
"Mix that with buff babes in bikinis and voila: a new reality TV show coming soon to your local cable channel, to be called the X Dames. A bunch of cute athletic women-a shifting cast of characters, depending on the sport and the locations and the available breast-enhanced yet athletic broads, I suspect--travel around to different places and engage in competitions. Surfing, biking, whatever. Between contests they're theoretically up to the usual backbiting, catfighting, bitch-slapping, and the other thrills and chills that make reality TV so enticing. To win dolares, trips to exotic foreign lands, dates with c-list TV actors. Its basic trash, but there's cash behind this trash, it seems kinda fun, and I have been anointed an associate producer-slash-writer with hiring power. So--you want a job?"
"You want to hire me? To do what?" Lucy stood and walked over to the railing to look down into the dark waters of the river. This was getting interesting.
"Reality TV is not always reality, Luce. I'm sure you know that. And this particular show is going to be fairly heavily scripted. But for some obscure reason they want to use only writers who've never worked in The Industry-hence the hire of yours truly, since I have never been near the tv biz, as you know-and the green light for me to hire you."
"So where does Milton Junior fit in?"
"He's the man behind the brilliant idea. He lives on top of Tuna Canyon, in his dad's old house."
"Right, the one that looks like a flying saucer. Isn't that where--"
"His mother fell to her death."
"Or was pushed."
"That's in my next chapter. But junior-his name is Bobby Schamberg, by the way, not Milton-doesn't seem to have a problem living with mommy's ghost. Especially since the pad has five bedrooms and a pool and views of the ocean you wouldn't believe. The original American Schambergs made it big in lighting fixtures in Chicago a hundred years ago, and Milton surprised us all-well, me, anyway, since I always assume little-known artists must be starving--by being, behind his Bohemian facade, a stock market whiz. He left a pile of dough which Bobby's been spending as fast as he can trying to play Hollywood. He's got a production company and thus far he's done a pair of seriously bad cable TV movies and a few sitcom pilots. The X Dames is his latest gambit. His ex-wife and current partner used to be a surfing champion, and they came up with the concept together. Since I was a writer and they knew me-I've been nosing around their lives for several years now, researching the book, and I think Bobby actually trusts me-they approached me, and I kind of helped them organize the initial proposal. Maybe they knew I needed money and did it out of pity. I don't know. In any case they found some backers, pitched the thing to the Outside Network, where Bobby had a friend, and the next thing you know they got greenlighted and I got a sort of--job." She stopped. Lucy waited. "So what do you think?"
"Does this mean I get to get out of New York for the summer?"
"Like next week. Now. And you can bring your dog. I've got you set up in a studio two blocks from the beach in Venice if you take the offer. It's tiny and two thousand a month but the producers are willing to pay you about five times that, at least while they get the thing off the ground. You've got a bit of a rep thanks to the Mexico book-speaking of which, we have to go to Mexico right away because they want to jump-start the show by staging a surfing contest in this little town north of Puerto Vallarta called Sayulita, and they tell me it's a north and west swell beach, so the waves will stop breaking once summer settles in."
"Jesus," said Lucy, awash in immediate and very cool possibilities. LA, working in TV, good money, another trip to Mexico, but this time the west coast, keeping those Isla Mujeres ghosts at bay a thousand miles away. A job! "It sounds too good to be true. Wow, Terry, I can't believe you pulled this off."
"I can't either. It fell on my head like a gold brick."
"I should say let me think about it for a couple of days but I'm more inclined, right now, to say, see you next week. I just have to deal with my loft and-""
"Perfect. I'll tell them to email you a draft contract. You can read it, make changes, print it out, sign it, and send it back to me. Trust me, it'll treat you right."
"Bueno. And Terry, thanks for thinking of me."
"I've seen you on a sailboard, Luce. You could probably be an X Dame yourself, were you so inclined."
"No way, Ter. I'm pushing 35 and way too Manhattanized for competition sports."
"But still, you know your way around the ocean."
"I guess. Listen, I gotta go get a bite. My dinner guest-none other than the fabulous Harry Ipswich-putzed out on me, so I'm wandering the streets in search of food."
"Again!? Doesn't he do that all the time?"
"His schedule is--unpredictable. And so I suffer. Instead of cooking for him I'm going to my favorite bistro and see what looks good. Wish you could join me."
"Cook up an X Dame location in New York and I will. Meanwhile next week we'll make the LA dining rounds. I still hate TV but it is nice to be getting a lot of money for a little work."
"Instead of a little money for a lot of work, the writer's usual fate. See you then." Lucy shut her phone, jumped in the air , then laughed out loud. "Claud, we are moving to Southern California!"
Fifteen minutes later, as she tethered Claud to a streetlamp and strolled into The Frog's Grotto, her Tribeca bistro of the moment, it dawned on her that at ten grand a month she'd make her twelve per cent of Harry's buried million in a year. She had no illusions that the gig would last that long, but even a couple of months at ten thousand per would add up to a pile of money. And getting out of Manhattan for the summer was, quite simply, priceless.
When Harry showed up three days later, tanned, tired, dirty, and bug-bitten, Lucy couldn't help but feel a low glimmer of satisfaction when she told him she was moving to LA for a while. "And of course you're welcome to the loft, as always," she added, handing him an ice-crusted shot glass of his favorite vodka. Harry had a mouse-sized fourth floor East Village walk-up, a tres chic locale but lacking air conditioning, with a tub in the kitchen and toilet down the hall, so staying at Lucy's loft, with or without her there, was like vacation for him. "And you don't even have to deal with the dogster. He's going with me, eh what, Claud? He'll be thrilled to see you when you come visit."
"Not so fast, kiddo," Harry said, and knocked back the shot. "Whooo, that's good." She poured him another. "Aside from the fact that I think you're crazy to go out there-LA is an inferno, Luce, and the TV industry inhabits the ninth circle-I've got my own out-of-town gig going. As it turns out I'm on assignment in Florida for a while."
"What? What kind of assignment? You said you were done with Florida for now."
"Well, actually I volunteered for surveillance duty on a couple of illicit landing strips in the jungle not far from Snake Creek. My cover is I'm doing a piece on the Everglades National Park for an airline magazine. But there is a ton of dope coming into the area by plane all the time, so I'll have my hands full. Who knows, I might even stop a few hundred pounds of coke or junk from finding its nasty way up here. But aside from that and the writing gig, the real reason I set it up is I've come up with a plan. I've been contemplating that Walmart situation I told you about, with the million bucks, and I think I know a way to get at the money without-"
"You can't be serious, Harry. I've never been in a Walmart but I imagine there's probably fifty tons of concrete sitting on top of your mythical bags of money, plus security up the wazoo."
"Exactly. Security. As in seriously underpaid dudes in blue shirts with tin badges who would probably be very happy to get ten per cent of my gross in exchange for getting me floor and fixture plans, and maybe running some cover, so that when I dig my tunnel from the swamp behind the back of the building I won't hit any cables, pipes, or people. I checked it out. There's a thick stand of jungle back there and the tunnel will only have to be about sixty or seventy feet long."
"A seventy foot tunnel under a Walmart superstore? Harry, you're nuts. This sounds like a really dumb-ass plan."
"You know what, Luce? Believe it or not I'm sick of being broke all the time. Sick of living in that overpriced rathole on East Seventh. I need a leg up and those guys weren't bullshitting me. The money's there for the taking, it's not stealing, and I'm the only person on the planet who knows about it. Excepting you, of course."
"It's a hare-brained scheme, Harry, and you know it. Besides, what am I going to do about the loft? Who can I get to stay here? I depend on you for this. You know I can't just advertise for a subletter. Not with the landlord situation."
"Hey, you're going to be working in TV. Making major money, right? If I were you I'd just leave it empty. You can afford six hundred a month for the peace of mind."
She hadn't thought of that. Maybe it was true. She just wasn't used to that kind of spare cash. "Well, I'm going to make a few calls, see if I can round up someone trustworthy. If not I guess I could just lock the door and walk away."
"Ask Jane downstairs to keep an eye on the place. She's kind of a friend, right? But I would take all your valuables and personal stuff. You never know what that fucking landlord might try."
Soon they cut the chatter and commenced with peeling each other's clothing off, a ritual that had only improved with time. By now, two years into it, they knew each other's hot spots, when and how to hit them. They spent that night together, and had great sex. Twice, with a vodka break between. Not at all bad for a fortysomething man and a thirtysomething girl. Even if she did kinda watch the clock, wondering. If her time was running out. Time for what? Love and marriage and a baby carriage? Who knew any more these days?
Whatever Harry had in the way of failings, he was a wonderful lover and had been since their very first nights together in Jamaica. Lucy suspected his unpredictable availability had something to do with it-that hoary old cliché, absence makes the heart grow fonder, having some bearing on the situation. He was definitely absent.
Come morning Harry went off to his East Village dump to prep for his own incipient departure back to the Florida swamps, and Lucy got on the phone to chase after subletters while breaking out her three suitcases and two duffelbags, having decided to do a major reassessment of her worldly goods, so that what she took to California would be all that she held dear, and what she left behind would be the basics.
Everything else she bagged for throwaway, including the collected back issues of SCRUB Magazine. By the time she was ready to go a week later she had sixteen bags of trash, five overstuffed suitcases, and a loft that had never looked better, empty of everything but furniture, a couple of prints, her five-year-old dinosaur desktop pc--drained of all her files--and the essentials in the kitchen and bathroom.
She never did find anyone she trusted enough to sublet or loft-sit. In the first week of May, with a signed hard copy of her $2500 per week X Dames contract in her carry-on and a back-up in her laptop, on the day before her departure to LA she ambled downstairs and after walking Claud around the block, she went into the building next door. She tied Claud up and ascended to the second floor, where the bad cop landlord, Itzak Lascovich, ran his business, SeaBee Fabric Merchants, out of a grubby little office in the corner of a dingy, fluorescent-lit, six-thousand square-foot loft crammed with chaotically-heaped twelve-foot rolls of cheap fabric. He dealt primarily with wholesalers in Africa, he claimed, but it was strange-in all her years in the loft she had never actually seen any fabric go into, or out of, his place of business. Only him, scurrying about in his rodent-like fashion.
She picked her way through the stacks of rolled fabric until she could see him through the dirty glass door of his office. He was greenish under the twittering lights, barking at someone on the phone, pushing his greasy white hair back with a clawlike hand. She tapped on the glass. He looked up, waved her in, continued barking. She opened the door. His wife, twice his size, thin brown hair pulled back tight, gaudy lipstick in place, tree trunk legs nicely stockinged and crossed, never said a word, sat there vigilant as she did all day every day. She glared at Lucy briefly, then returned her gaze to the middle distance. Lascovich waved at the one chair not covered by papers, fabric samples, his skinny ass or his wife's fat one. Lucy sat, feeling rather sassy in spite of the grim vibe in the grim little room. How they could spend fifty or sixty hours a week in this hole she had never figured out. "Goodbye," he said to the phone, then hung up. "So Miss Lucy Ripken it is the third of May you haf my rent?"
"I do, yes." She put the check on his desk. He picked it up, looked at it, frowned, and shook his head. "Sometime you will pay market value, Miss Lucy Ripken."
"Not this year." She smiled at him. "Don't forget it was you that initiated the lawsuit, Izzy."
"You are illegal. The whole lot of you. And I will get my buildink back sometime."
"Well, maybe so, but not today. Oh by the way," she went on, hoping her casual tone would carry the moment. She had decided that though it would be risky to reveal her plans, it would be better than having Jane spring it on him after she was gone. This way, at least, she would have some idea of his response-and she could then deal accordingly. "I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be traveling for a while, and the place won't be occupied. But I will be paying rent, through Jane Aronstein, so you don't need to--"
"You can't go away and keep my floor for you to come back and--"
"Of course I can, Itzak. I will be paying the rent and--"
"If the place is not occupied then I am having it."
"I don't think so, Mr.--"
"I don't care what you are thinking, I am--"
"This conversation is over, Iz. I'll have my lawyer call you."
"No. I will be taking the place when you--"
"Good day, Mrs. Lascovich," she said, and breezed out. Then stormed down the stairs. "Damn," she said to Claud as she unhooked his leash from the banister, slammed out the door, and stood on the Broadway sidewalk, trying to collect herself. "God damn, pup," she said. "That guy is so infuriating."
She went into her own building, hiked up to her loft, and got on the phone with Jack Harshman, who'd been her legal pit bull on matters residential since the day she moved into the loft and Lascovich tried to evict her.
Later, after hours, she put all of her trash out on the street in black plastic bags, and then she did what Harshman had advised. She spent two hundred and fifty dollars to have a locksmith come over and hike up the stairs and change one of the three locks on her door and on the door inside the elevator at the other end of the loft. She gave a set of new keys to her downstairs neighbor Jane, with strict instructions not to let Lascovich or anyone else have them under any circumstances. Jane had been in the building even longer than Lucy so she got it. Lucy pocketed the other set.
After a less-than-rousing overnighter with Harry, whose excessive, mournful vodka drinking rendered him entirely incapable, they left for La Guardia at seven a.m., she with five suitcases and a carry-on containing her camera and laptop. Harry had a single carry-on. His Miami flight left at 9:30, half an hour before Lucy's L.A. flight. They got their cell numbers and tentative plans to meet organized and said goodbye, Harry's hangdog, hungover face the unfortunate last image Lucy and the drugged and caged Claud had of him as he forlornly headed off to find his boarding gate. As he disappeared into the crowd charging through the terminal, Lucy found it hard to believe he was actually going to Florida to burrow a tunnel under the back end of a Walmart in search of a plastic bag with a million dollars inside. She, on the other hand, had a contract and a check for $11,000 in her pocket, a one month advance from the producers of the X Dames. They had thrown in the extra thousand in moving expenses, and so after checking her bags, and dishing out a fifty dollar tip to make sure Claud got treated right en route, and doing security, and hitting the latte stand, and grabbing a TIMES from the concourse newsstand, and waiting for half an hour at the gate, Lucy pre-boarded with the gilded gang, and traveled first class for the first time in her life. She was going Hollywood.
