“Howie—” I tried a reasonable tone, if only to get a lift home at three A.M.
“I’m not going to end up like you!” he spat, barring the car door. “I’m going back to work! I’m bored to goddamn tears! All this … retiring … is killing me! So here, you want to find that goddamned stupid film—” He counted out a few bills, one of which he stuffed in the attendant’s palm. Then he flung the others at me. “Good luck!”
In a minute, he had peeled out, his tires screaming. A baby picture of Howie’s son, Elliot, had sailed out at the same time. Now it lay in a puddle on the ground.
I stood there, the money fluttering toward my feet. The attendant only shrugged, looking bemusedly at his windfall: a hundred-dollar bill. Then he left me in the dark garage, alone.
Howie had been giving me more and more power. Finally, he’d allowed me sway over his entire professional life. That was worth a lot more than three hundred bucks, which I now stooped to retrieve. But it was probably the only thing I would ever get from him. I stuffed the dough into my front pants pocket.
I wasn’t the only one who wanted the money.
Lurking in the shadows outside, a figure now peeked in from the garage entrance. Then it disappeared. The street was otherwise empty.
I planned to sleep in my own bed that night, which was a few blocks away. I would call Dena first thing in the morning, which was an hour from now.
But first I had to get by the guy outside.
HE WAS ON MY TAIL THE MINUTE I EMERGED ONTO FORTIETH STREET. I heard his footsteps, nearly felt his breath. When I took a quick glimpse behind me, I saw a thin man, his face hidden by a sweatshirt hood.
I cut across Eighth Avenue, at full gallop.
I’d been chased so many times recently, it was almost refreshing to merely get mugged. In a second, I realized that wasn’t what was happening.
“Roy!” the guy called, coming after me.
My blood froze, as my feet found the other sidewalk. Without stopping, I looked back again, helplessly, responding to my name. His face was still a black hole beneath his hood. When I turned forward, I was heading right into a mound of garbage at the threshold of an alley.
I tripped and fell onto McDonald’s boxes, plastic wrap, Chinese food, and, yes, banana peels. But my friend was conscientious enough to help me up—yanking me by my belt loops and collar and tossing me ahead of him, into the alley.
“Alley oop!”
This wasn’t his first time hurting someone; he seemed pretty good at it. I thought about a movie in the early Eighties, Beginners, starring Elizabeth McGovern and Keith Gordon as young lovers—a Norman Lear production. It was abandoned, never started up again, and declared dead.
So nearly was I, my face pressed into asphalt. As the man stooped to hammer his fist into my side, I thought of something else. The voice he’d used on “Alley oop!” had been a Homer Simpson imitation. It was almost as good as his Jerry Lewis doing Shakespeare or his cowboy. It was the dismissed young comic.
He punched me again in the side.
“Where is it, Roy?” he said.
What had he said? Before he could speak again—he had already started a syllable—I flailed an elbow back into his throat. My aim was erratic; I hit him in the collarbone, which made my entire arm ring. Still, it shut him up. I took the opportunity to speak.
“Help!”
Amazingly, I was answered by a police siren. Maybe they were napping nearby, I thought. The sound spurred my attacker into flight. As I flipped over, I saw him making for the alley’s entrance. His hood hung down, but I could only see the back of his head.
He took a fast left and ran from sight. There was maybe a full minute of siren before the cop car showed, from the other direction. One cop stayed inside while another got out, cautiously. He looked into the alley, where I now sat, nursing my reverberating arm.
“Don’t move!”
“Don’t worry,” I replied.
He wasn’t amused. “I said, don’t move!”
Wincing, I put my hands up. What else could I do? He had a gun on me. Meanwhile, behind him, in the street, I alone saw a battered white Honda drive by at high speed.
—
“What’d you say you were doing there?”
Same precinct, same detective. Florent stood opposite me again, looking even more the Central Casting cop than before.
“He tried to rob me,” I said.
I didn’t say that it had to do with Clown, even though I figured that it had.
“This have something to do with The Day the Clown Cried?” Florent asked.
I closed my eyes, the lids feeling like they weighed a hundred pounds. My luck to always get this cop, who thought he was trivial.
“What?” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”
Florent only nodded, with a brief, unconvinced “Uh huh.”
“I mean, that’s really …” I was shaking my head now, clucking with disbelief, “just really crazy …”
“Maybe,” he shrugged a little. “Maybe.”
Before I could start on a new boring trivial discourse—my only line of defense against him, short of crying—Florent had hiked up his pants and left the room.
