Free Among the Living by Dan Vining Page A

torso wedged into the requisite Nik-Nik pointy-collared polyester shirts and beltless, high-waisted flared pants. He remembered his name as Wayne or Dwayne, which is what you’d think, looking at Bill Danko.
    He didn’t know that Elaine Kantke was dead. DJs read Billboard, not the Times. He’d just assumed The Jolly Girls had found a new club or their husbands had finally gotten around to seeing Saturday Night Fever and had shortened their leashes.
    “I learned two things about the bar business—and about life—when I was at Big Daddy’s,” Darren Price said.
    Jimmy wondered how many times he’d said that line.
    “The first thing, Big Daddy Joe Flannigan himself said to me personally. One night after we closed and we were all drinking kamikazes at the bar, he said to all of us, ‘What business are we in?’ Somebody of course said, the booze business, thinking that was what he wanted to hear. He had a white beard, looked kind of like Hemingway and wore these white shorts and a Kelly green shirt and he was big. Joe shook his head. Not the booze business. There were a couple more wrong guesses. He looked at me. I said, ‘The entertainment business.’ Big Daddy shook his head.”
    Price was going to make Jimmy wait for it.
    Jimmy waited for it.
    “ ‘We’re in the loneliness business.’ Not loneliest, loneli ness . . .”
    Jimmy got it. He nodded his head.
    “Buying or selling?” he said.
    Darren Price didn’t get it.
    “What was the second thing you learned?” Jimmy said.
    “Hats start fights.”
    They talked another half hour. Lloyd-the-Void looked disappointed when Jimmy stood up to go.

    It was almost four. The Kinko’s that occupied the space where Big Daddy’s used to be was open all night. They’d ripped off the two-story front and put in glass all the way up. It was a box of light in front of the empty parking lot. There were six or eight people in there under the ghastly bright lights, two guys behind the counter and one running the big machine that wasn’t self-serve. They probably kept the reams of paper down below in what had been the serious room, Tone Espinosa’s room.
    They’d left the entrance the same, six steps up to what had been the main room of the club. Elaine Kantke and Bill Danko had climbed those steps, looking to do something about their loneliness, if you believed Big Daddy.
    Jimmy sat on the front fender of the Porsche, the car he’d picked that morning from the line in the garage.
    “Why do people need to make copies in the middle of the night?” he said, out loud, to no one. “What are they copying?”
    A coughing VW bug came in, fast. A man with a belly and a colorless T-shirt the size that maybe fit him when he was twenty got out and charged in, taking two steps at a time, his fist clutching a thick sheaf of papers. There was one answer: it was open for the people up all night grinding their teeth at some grievance, consumer or governmental, assembling their cases, ready to by God fire off some papers in the morning.
    It had been a long day. The days got longer when Jimmy was working, felt that way anyway. This story was at that early stage where everything was incomplete, sketchy, self-contradictory—and he had done this enough to know that a big part of what he was “learning” was just simply wrong.
    A seagull landed on a light stanchion. Jimmy turned around and looked toward Marina Del Rey, the immense condominiums which stood over the wide channels and the hundreds of slips. The tops of the tallest masts were visible between the towers.
    The light was odd, noncommittal. He wished the sun would come up, right now.
    An LAPD sergeant’s cruiser pulled in beside him. The cop was alone. The window was down.
    “Saint Thomas,” Jimmy said.
    The patrol cars all had computer monitors hung on the dash now and a full-size keyboard where you used to put your coffee. The radio spoke, the voice female and not very friendly. You could tell the cop was a sergeant by the