CHAPTER THREE
Jack Rawson hunched over the desk in his office and flattened out a map of the eastern United States. He used his driver’s license to position a rail of cocaine between Fort Wayne and Battle Creek. He put a rolled-up dollar bill to his nostril, sucked in the line, lifted his head, and sniffed a couple of times. He laid another track and snorted his way up from Pittsburgh along I-79. Tania knocked on the door.
“I need some help out here,” she called out. “I can’t greet ’em, seat ’em, and feed ’em all by myself.”
“OKAY, OKAY,” shouted Jack.
He pinched some powder from the outside of his nose and licked it off his fingers. He pulled out a desk drawer and stuffed the coke deep inside.
Tania hurried to a glass-doored refrigerator and pulled out two house salads. She ladled them with dressing and set them on the wait station.
Jack paraded by the customers at the host stand singing. “From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.”
He scrounged up menus from behind the podium, turned to the crowd, and addressed the first two people in line.
“Holy Toledo, it’s Ron Silverman and Lorraine Zacarro from UMN!”
Jack led them to a table.
“Hey, Brooklyn Ron, I’m considering coming back to work for you, but just part-time.”
Silverman shook his head.
“I don’t know, Jack. The university kind of likes it when the professors show up for class sober.”
“How do they feel about department chairs who marry students?” asked Jack.
“When both parties are over twenty-one, it’s none of their business,” answered Silverman.
Ron opened his menu.
“Any specials tonight, Jack, or is it the same shit, just a different day?”
“I’ll get your waitress; you can ask her.”
Jack strutted over to Tania. She was picking up a tofu stroganoff and a fakin’ bacon, lettuce, and tomato from the line.
“After you drop those off, get over to thirty-one; they’re business associates of mine.”
Tania looked over at the table and squinted.
“Oh, no, I can’t wait on them.”
“Oh yeah, why not?”
“I used to be married to that man.”
“Were you the student?”
“No, I was the teacher.”
Tania kept her back to Ron as she served the stroganoff and fake BLT. Jack called over to a server who was dragging a box of oranges out of a walk-in cooler.
“Hey, Rene, I’ll take those over to the bar. Go wait on thirty-one.”
Tania maintained a low profile until the jukebox malfunctioned, and Bob Dylan kept repeating, “It ain’t me, Babe.” Ron looked up from his meatless meatloaf and saw her holding a couple of dirty dishes and kicking the machine with her foot. She saw him seeing her, gave an Oliver Hardy wave with her fingers, dumped the plates in a bus pan, and headed to the ladies’ room.
Tania wiped her face with a wet paper towel and put on more lipstick.
I made a baby with that man, had an abortion, and left him for somebody else, she thought. If I told him I was sorry, it would be a lie.
After he dropped off the oranges, Jack went into his office, reached his hand into the back of the desk drawer, and pulled out his stash.
Now, where was I? he asked himself.
When Tania returned to the dining room, Ron was gone, and a group of lefties with BO were waiting to be seated. She put together two tables, and their spokesman lost no time placing an order.
“We’ll have a couple of Coronas, a Cuba Libre . . . two glasses of White Zin . . . no, what the hell, make it a bottle, three Heinekens, three orders of guac and chips . . . eight chili and cornbread, two veggie burgers with extra everything, three Cajun Hot Plates, a Rasta Pasta, and two Cosmic Salads. Oh yeah, and when we’ve finished that, bring like three carrot cakes for us to share and a round of cappuccinos.”
These people mustn’t have eaten since Woodstock, thought Tania.
The group killed three bottles of White Zin, cleaned their plates, and drained their coffee cups. They were reliving the co-op wars when Tania brought their check.
“Ah . . . there must be some mistake. Jack always takes care of us. We were in a commune together,” said the spokesman.
“And a collective,” piped in a member of the group.
“Until he sold out and opened this place,” added someone else.
Tania made a trip to Jack’s office. She knocked and then opened the door. He swung around in his chair.
“What the hell do you want? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“No, I’m busy, and you’re getting high.”
“Screw you.”
“Uh . . . no thanks.”
Tania tilted her head in the direction of the dining room.
“Some freeloaders who say they knew you ‘before you sold out and opened this place’ just stuffed themselves and expect you to cover it.”
She waved their guest check in the air.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
Jack pounced on Tania and grabbed the check from her hand.
“Shit, that was fourteen years ago. I was twenty-nine years old; I had a wife and two-year-old kid. I didn’t sell out; I needed to make a living.”
He tore out of the office and into the dining room.
“There’s our man,” called out the spokesman.
Jack put his hands on the backs of two chairs and leaned over their table.
“Sorry about the mix-up folks; the waitress is new . . . starving thespian . . . needed a job. Thought I’d give her a break.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s why it’s called the Good Karma Cafe.”
“It doesn’t hurt that she’s easy on the eyes. Eh, Jackie boy?” said the spokesman.
“I hadn’t noticed. Oh yeah, don’t bother about a tip. I’ll take care of it.”
The spokesman raised his glass.
“Here’s to Jack.”
The others lifted up what was left of their free drinks.
“To Jack.”
Rawson strode over to Tania at the wait station and signed the tab with her pen.
“Where’s the tip you told them you were giving me?”
“Tip? Here’s a tip. Stop being such a wiseass.”
“Jack Rawson, you’re rude to me, and I don’t like it,” said Tania.
She turned and stomped away.
Jack bummed a cigarette from Jose, the dishwasher, went out a screened back door, and lit up. Holding the cigarette in the side of his mouth, he unlocked a salt box and pulled out a pint of gin. Jack sat on an empty beer keg and flicked the cigarette into a puddle. He opened the pint and took a swig. Through the screen door, he heard Al Green on the jukebox and Tania on the pay phone.
“. . . but Christopher, he’s so rude to me.”
The next morning, Jack sped over to the federal building in his ’78 shitmuckle brown Buick. It was thirty-six degrees. All the windows in the car were open to let out the exhaust seeping into the interior from a hole in the floorboard. Jack swerved the car over to the curb next to a NO PARKING—LOADING ZONE sign. He turned off the engine and reached into the glove compartment.
Time for the old “confuse the traffic cop into thinking he already gave you a parking ticket” trick. Rawson pulled out an unpaid citation and stuck it under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side.
Jack rushed into the revolving door at the entrance to the building and took the elevator to the fifth floor. When the door opened, he spotted his family’s attorney, Paul Brodie, standing by a display of IRS pamphlets. The lawyer was checking his watch.
“I’m not late, am I, Paul? My alarm didn’t go off.”
His alarm didn’t go off; it’s fucking one in the afternoon.
James Folger came into the reception area and led the two men through a glass door into a bullpen of cubicles. He directed them to his workspace. Once everyone had settled, Folger spread open a file on his desk and adjusted himself in his seat.
“Mister Rawson, are you trying to cheat the government?” he said.
Jack looked closely at his accuser.
“I know you. You went to St. Augie’s Teen Club. I thought you wanted to be a cop. You were too short, right?”
Before Folger could answer, Paul Brodie jumped in.
“Now, Jack, Jim’s a busy man, so let’s get down to business.”
“You can call me Mr. Folger, and I want Mr. Rawson to answer my question.”
Brodie jumped in again.
“Jack and I have discussed his oversight in this matter. We’d like to set up a reasonable payment plan to cover the dishonored check penalties, the late filing fees, and, of course, the taxes.”
Folger took a piece of paper from the folder and pushed it across the desk.
“Is this what you had in mind?”
Jack and Brodie looked over the payment schedule.
“Whoa,” said Jack. “The cafe barely breaks even as it is. That’s a lot of money to come up with every month.”
Folger closed the folder.
“You owe us a lot of money.”
Brodie slapped Jack on the back.
“Now, Jack, remember what your old man used to say?”
Mix your mother another martini is what came to Jack’s mind.
Brodie continued, “He used to say, ‘Every kick in the ass is a push forward.’ That’s the attitude that got him elected to the state senate for three terms. You know who Jack’s father was, don’t you, Mr. Folger?”
The IRS man tilted back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.
“Now you’re taking me back. I remember my dad . . .”
Folger straightened up in his seat.
“I remember my dad looking up from the old Minneapolis Star and saying, ‘That four-flusher Rawson is running again.’ Then he turned to me. ‘You know what a four-flusher is, don’tcha, son? It’s someone who’s so full of shit he has to flush the toilet four times.’ Boy, did we howl.”
Folger paused then chuckled.
“Thirty-five years later, it still makes me laugh.”
When the appointment was over, Jack rushed into the revolving door at the entrance to the building. He stopped short at the sight of a parking enforcement officer taking down his license-plate number.
“Oh shit.”
Jack continued around and back into the building. The patrolman stuck a ticket on top of the one Jack put under the windshield wiper.
The cop muttered to himself, “Oldest trick in the book. I was born at night but not last night, ya dumb fuck.”
Rawson counted to five hundred and stole out of the building. He pulled the two tickets off his windshield, jumped in the car, and put the citations in the glove compartment.
“I need a cocktail. I don’t need a cocktail; I need a coke-tail,” said Jack.
He laughed at his own joke and searched his pockets.
“What the hell did I do with the address that guy gave me?”
He pulled out a scrap of paper, drove toward 2nd Street, and headed to the Paradise Lounge.
Inside the lounge, Gloria, the bartender, was slicing limes and watching The Young and the Restless. Jack lifted himself onto a barstool and ordered a double shot of tequila. Gloria poured the drink.
“Is Roy around?” asked Jack.
“There’s nobody here named Roy,” answered Gloria.
Jack checked the slip of paper in his shirt pocket.
“I mean Ray.”
“I’ll have to see. What’s your name?”
“Tell ’im it’s Jack . . . Jack Rawson; I’m a friend of a friend of his.”
Gloria turned away and made a phone call. Jack pulled a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros on the bar and lit it. Gloria put down the receiver and cocked her head toward a hallway marked NO ADMITTANCE.
“Ray’s in his office; it’s the first door on the right.”
Jack crushed out the cigarette, downed the tequila, and got up.
“You owe me three bucks for the drink.”
“I’m a friend of Ray’s.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a guy who ordered a drink and doesn’t want to pay for it.”
Rawson reached in his pants pocket, pulled out a crumpled wad of bills, and left three singles on the bar.
Jack made his way to the door marked PRIVATE. A few minutes later, he dug into a half a gram of cocaine, and Ray Scalise put the cash from the sale into the drawer where he kept his gun.
He doesn’t remember me; that’s good, thought Ray. That’s very good.
“I can get you a break on quantity; got any friends who might be interested?” asked Scalise.
Jack rubbed his index finger across his gums.
“I can’t think of anybody right now.”
Later that night, Tania was refilling the salt and pepper shakers in the cafe’s dining room when Jack blasted through the front door. He took a quarter from the cash register and put it in the jukebox. He punched the button for “Waltz Across Texas” and turned up the volume. Tania was leaning over a four-top when Jack grabbed her from behind.
“Wanna dance?”
Tania spun around and grazed his cheek with the corner of her father’s onyx ring.
Jack’s fingers went to his face.
“I was just trying to be nice.”
