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“The place is already mortgaged to the hilt,” he said, looking around the room and shaking his head. “The business account is low. The credit is maxed out. We operate week to week. All our savings are gone. There’s nothing I can sell that’s worth anywhere near what I owe.”
He glanced up, but when our eyes met he quickly looked away. I felt a chill creep up my spine. I said, “When you say our savings are gone… What does that mean?”
The answer came when he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He stared down into the coffee cup, which had grown too cold to drink. I asked again, “Dad, what does that mean?”
“It means I already lost our savings,” he said, almost too quiet for me to hear. “It’s gone. Every last cent.”
“When you say our savings, you don’t mean my savings? My college money?” He didn’t have to answer. I knew the truth by the look of guilt that was washing over his face like a fine sweat. My fingernails cut into my palms as I tightened my fists on the table. My breathing grew heavy until it felt like my lungs were going to burst. I gritted my teeth and willed the tears back from my eyes.
“Dad, my college money…”
“It’s gone, Katrina,” he said, whispering. He started to cry again. “Every cent. It’s all gone.”
Nicky D’Angelo
“I fucking hate Sundays, man,” my cousin Tony said as he pounded back the tequila shot the waitress had just set it front of him. He immediately ordered another round, though the three shots in front of me were so far untouched. He picked up the bottle of beer he was using to chase the tequila, drained it dry, and slammed the bottle on the table.
“Why do you hate Sundays so much?” I asked, sliding one of my tequila shots across the table to him. We’d only been there for half an hour and I could already tell that it was going to be a long afternoon, probably followed by a long night if Tony didn’t find a girl (or girls) to occupy his time. Tony didn’t skip a beat. He picked up the shot and splashed it down his throat.
He sighed and smacked his lips. “Because the only bitches here on Sunday are all fucking second string pussy,” he growled, swishing his hand through the air at the assortment of nude dancers and topless waitresses who were milling around the club, doing their best to suck every last dollar out of the patrons like vampires suck blood from their victims. The girls glanced our way every now and then, but they knew better than to approach the VIP area uninvited. Tony could be a real prick when he was in one of his moods, so like good dogs lying in the yard, they knew to only come onto the porch when their master called. And Tony considered himself to be their master, without a doubt.
He picked up another of my shots and grumbled into the glass. “I don’t know why all the best girls have to get off work on Sunday. Surely to shit they’re not all in fucking church. I’m gonna complain to management.”
“Aren’t you management?” I asked.
He grinned. “Whatever.”
I smiled and sipped my beer. I smiled a lot when I was around Tony, depending on his mood. He was a lot of fun to be around, at least until he got shitfaced and wanted to fight some poor schmuck who had looked at him wrong or was taking away the attention of some girl he’d had his eyes on. Of course, Tony never did the fighting himself. He never had, not even when we were kids. That’s what Jimmy Fist was for. Jimmy sat next to Tony scanning the room with his beady eyes as if Tony was the president and he was a Secret Service Agent on steroids. Jimmy was three hundred pounds of hard muscle toting half a pound of brain. He was a humorless pit bull of a man who wore tight Armani suits and black t-shirts with a large gold cross dangling from a thick gold chain around his neck. Most people thought the cross meant that he was religious. They were wrong. The cross was hollow and the top screwed off. It was where Jimmy kept Tony’s stash of blow when they were out on the town. The only time Jimmy Fist went into a church was to steal the collection plate when we were kids or to beat up a priest when we were teenagers because Tony said the guy looked like a pedophile. He probably wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to Jimmy. He just did what Tony commanded him to do.
“That girl is a five out of motherfucking ten,” Tony said, rolling his eyes at one of the nude dancers who was leading a drunk guy in a suit toward a private room for a lap dance and whatever favors he could afford to buy. He tapped the air with his finger like he was pecking on a typewriter. “That one’s a seven, that one’s a six, that one’s not even on the fucking scale. Christ, Nicky, I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”
“That’s good because my dick is not available for you to use,” I said.
“Your dick’s too small for me to use,” Tony said with a laugh, bumping Jimmy with his elbow. Jimmy grunted without smiling and cut me a sideways look. Jimmy and I were not friends. Never had been, never would be. I thought he was a fucking thug and he thought I was a condescending asshole. We were probably both correct to a large degree.
Tony was still grumbling about the lack of what he called “Grade-A pussy” working the club that afternoon. He considered himself to be quite the expert on gentleman’s club pussy and pussy in general. Lord knows he’d had more than his share of it, paid and free. Tony was a good-looking guy, not too tall, not too thin, with the dark Italian looks of the D’Angelo family, with coal black hair and olive skin and deep-set brown eyes that could cut through you like a laser. A lot of people mistook us for brothers rather than cousins, though I was a year older, a couple of inches taller, and had about twenty pounds of muscle on him thanks to my rugby playing days at school and the daily workouts I did with the personal trainer who came to my office every afternoon. The only heavy lifting Tony did was dragging his ass out of bed every morning. And sometimes he had to call Jimmy to help him with that.
I listened to Tony rate more girls as I sipped my beer and watched the naked girl who was dancing on the main stage at the center of the room. She was rubbing herself against the silver stripper pole to some George Michael song like she was getting fucked by the invisible man. She was a redhead with big hair and big tits and an ass you could set a drink on. Her pubes were waxed clean, so I had no idea if the carpeting matched the drapes. Her clit had a silver ring pierced into it. Ouch… I was wondering how it felt to have a metal rod pushed through the hood of one’s clit when she caught me looking at it. She used her fingers to pull back her mound to give me a better look at her cunt. She gave me a dreamy look and grinned. There was a large gap between her front teeth. She stuck her tongue through it. I quickly looked away. Tony was right. Sunday was for the second string at best.
“Maybe all the best girls rest on Sunday because they work so late on Saturday night lap dancing for pricks like you,” I said thoughtfully, as if I was hypothesizing one of the great mysteries of life. “On Sunday, you get the leftovers. Although, some of them are still pretty hot.”
“Yeah, if you like a gap between their front teeth that you can shove your dick through,” he said, nodding at the dancer who was still looking my way. He sat back and shook his head. “I’m gonna have a little talk with Mavis,” he said, referring to the former stripper-cum-manager who managed the dancer’s schedules. “If she’s gonna bring out the second-string pussy on Sunday afternoon she ought’a at least discount the motherfucking lap dances. Or put them on a sliding the scale. The hotter the bitch, the more it costs.”
I snorted a laugh and rolled my eyes at him. “When’s the last time you paid for a lap dance, motherfucker? Or for a drink, for that matter?” I oversaw the accounting for the club and handled the public set of books (someone else handled the private ones), so I knew who paid and who didn’t. Granted, the club was owned by Tony’s dad, my uncle Gino D’Angelo. Neither Tony or I had ever paid for anything in all the years we’d been coming here; drinks, pussy or otherwise. I reminded him of that fact and added, “You can’t complain when the shit is free.”
“Of course, I can,” he said with a smirk, reaching for my last shot. “Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it has to be low quality. If I think it’s shitty, the customers will think it’s shitty. And shitty pussy is bad for business. You graduated from a big fancy school. You know what I’m talking about. It’s simple economics.”
“I must have been out the day they covered shitty pussy and its effect on the e
conomy.”
“Fucking college boy,” he snorted, shaking his head. “I never even drove past a college and I’m smarter than you.” He bumped Jimmy with his elbow. “Ain’t that right, Jimmy boy?”
“That’s right,” Jimmy grunted. He looked at me and wrinkled his nose like I was a bad smell. “Fucking college boy.”
I almost told him to go fuck himself but decided to let it go. I wasn’t afraid of Jimmy, to the contrary, I kicked his ass when we were in high school and I could do it again today. He was all muscle and strong as a fucking ox, but in a fair fight he moved with the speed and grace of a sloth. One good punch to the nose or jaw and his knees would buckle like toothpicks. I just didn’t want to spend my Sunday afternoon picking his teeth out of my knuckles.
Tony grinned at me, waiting for my reply. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to get into it with Jimmy, he downed the shot and wiped his lips on the back of his hand just as the waitress arrived with a full tray of shots and beers.
