Free How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie Debartolo Page A

goddamn question.”
    “I’ve never real y—”
    “Score!” he said, discovering a five-dol ar bil under a mess of pens, rubber bands, and plastic cutlery.
    As soon as we were on the street, Paul prodded me to walk faster. “Kick it in the ass or we’l miss the first game.”
    “Why don’t we take the subway?”
    He came to a smashing halt in the middle of the sidewalk. “ Subway ?” he said, as if I’d invited him to walk through the gates of hel . “I don’t ride anything that goes underground. I’l be subterranean enough when I’m dead.”
    Witnessing Paul exhibit vulnerability, even superciliously,
also made me want to touch his chest. I’d never had the urge to touch anybody’s chest, but Paul was so animated and energetic, I imagined a metrical, pumping drum pounding in place of a heartbeat, and I wanted to feel the rhythm. I wanted to merge with it. I wanted to be it.
    “That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
    He laughed. “Warning: if you insult my heterosexual eminence one more time, I’m going to have to throw you down in the middle of the street and prove myself.” I almost said it again, just to test him.
    Six months is a long time.
    It was a thousand degrees outside.
    “A-ha,” Paul said. “Now I know how to shut you up.” In silence, we continued west halfway across town, eventual y arriving at the door of a nondescript building with a green awning that said St. Vrain Senior Center.
    “You said we were gambling.”
    “We are.”
    “This looks like a home for old people.”
    “What, old people can’t gamble?”
    “They better have air-conditioning.”
    Paul took me by the elbow and dragged me through the door, down a long hal way, and into a sad, spacious rec room with a low ceiling, a drab linoleum floor, and—thank the Lord—air-conditioning. The sour smel of urine and powdered mashed potatoes hung in the air.
    A fleshy, middle-aged woman named Mary Lou waved at Paul. She cal ed him Wil ie and told him to sit at table five. “Patty asked if you were coming,” Mary Lou said. “She claims she never wins when you’re not here.”
    “Patty is the most competitive player in this place,” Mary Lou told me, her nose scrunching into a snout. “And she has a little crush on Wil ie.”
    Must be an infectious disease, I mused, fol owing Paul to
6a desk where another overweight woman sat with a box of Hello, My Name Is tags.
    Paul picked up a black marker, wrote WILLIE in big, robotic letters, and stuck it on his shirt.
    “What’s with the name?”
    “My alias,” he whispered. “Don’t blow my cover. I have a reputation to uphold. These people think I’m a goddamn kindergarten teacher.”
    I laughed. “Right. Because you look so much like a kindergarten teacher.”
    He fil ed out another tag and placed it above my heart, ostensibly trying to avoid making contact with anywhere I might construe as out-of-bounds. I kept my eyes locked on his as he pressed the paper into my chest, at which point I experienced a rush of blood to the inguinal region of my body.
    “What?” he said, smirking.
    “Nothing.”
    There were at least a dozen people at al ten tables. Paul and I approached number five and a frail woman with white hair, a ghoulish smile, and lines that ran down her face like the Manhattan bus map said, “Roger, move over. Wil ie likes to sit by me.”
    Roger, a toothless man who looked as old as a dinosaur, offered up his chair. “There’s my girl,” Paul said, giving Patty a big smooch on the cheek.
    I looked around the room and noticed a number of people under the age of thirty. Some, I guessed, were family members. Others were obviously volunteers.
    “Do you come here a lot?” I asked Paul.
    “Once a month or so. I started coming after I moved to the city because someone told me volunteers got free meals.” Patty had four cards going at one time and never missed a beat. During the first game she was a B-17 away from BINGO and cursed out loud