Free My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond Page B

lifted this from a Vermont state senator on a gimlet tour of the area. He placed a shaving mirror on the bar and whisked his mustache with a dainty comb, like he wasflicking off crumbs. He dipped his pinkie in a tin of beeswax and smoothed down each felty eyebrow, his movements crisp, somehow superstitious.
    â€œIt’s how you look in profile,” he told his reflection. “Just who you are, that thing you have; sex all over you. What can she do? What choice does she have, Don? She wants in the mouth. Let her in, Don. Let her in.”
    So sailed The Don, under his own wind, away from Peck and toward his intended, a sunstruck midwesterner with a froth of ginger hair. She wore a sundress and a lavender bra whose straps hugged the balls of her shoulders like a holster. What The Don called a real
Minerva.
He bowed before taking a seat, and smiled. (Peck especially hated The Don’s teeth; Peck whose teeth looked like dried lemon seeds.)
    They talked for a while, The Don mostly, asking questions in that way he had, his eyelids droopy with some shared sorrow, his mouth producing soft puffs of empathy. He lit her menthol 100s and told her about how this joint used to be owned by Meyer Lansky, how there’s a dent in the backroom where the great man himself kicked in the plaster after a visit from the IRS.
    Except that the Romanians had him spooked. Every time the door swung open he lost his place, the spell of seduction drifting up and leaving his hands behind, jittery as rabbits. He came to the bar for a third drink. Behind him, we could see Minerva stand abruptly and zip her purse.
    Peck grinned his ghastly grin. “Here’s a hint,” he said. “You lose.”
    The Don assumed a look of monumental boredom. “Sappho’s delight,” he said, watching her lovely can swish away. “Isle of Lesbos.”

    â€œWhat’re you saying? She’s a dyke?” Peck laughed, a sound like tin being scraped. He sniffed The Don’s twenty. “Plus ten and a half for the drinks, Casanova.”
    The door swung open and The Don, busy resculpting his hair, froze in the pose of a man with shampoo in his eyes. In walked Balanchine, one of the part-time drunks.
    Peck laughed again. “Would you look at the guy? Like a ghost that just saw another ghost. Like, a bigger ghost.”
    It was hard for me to watch this: The Don’s poise undone by fear. I felt he should be above fear.
    â€œWhat happened?” Scoonie said. “You had her going.”
    â€œI told her she smelled smoky and sweet. Like cured bacon.”
    â€œHint,” Peck said. “Don’t compare women to pork.”
    â€œEverybody loves bacon,” The Don said quietly. “Show me who doesn’t love bacon.”
    â€œDumb,” Peck said. “Dumb Don. Ask your boy.”
    I was counting lemons, one of many mindless duties Peck delighted in assigning me.
    The Don said, “What do you know, Pancho?”
    What
did
I know? I was nineteen years old, on the lam from college, a half step from ditching my old life for good. I was sure of very little; only that my parents had failed me somehow. It was a matter of getting far enough away to see things clearly. “Maybe she’s kosher or something,” I said. “I myself love bacon.”
    The Romanians were scary. They moved like men with concealed weapons, stiff in the wrong places, darker and thinner and somehow meaner than the Russian mobsters up the walk. They spoke alanguage that sounded argumentative and drunken, portending crude brands of violence.
    Each week a bit more of The Don’s sparkle faded. His nose began to twitch; his baritone faltered. Even the tourists who’d arrived in town hoping for foolish entanglement—the moussed, gum-murdering upstaters and shy Canadian divorcées, the slightly grubby au pair girls—began regarding him doubtfully.
    The Don knew the only way out of his slump was to keep swinging,