I’d rolled the chair in at the end of an aisle only to be met with a barrage of smart-ass remarks about blocking their view from a brace of twenty-somethings, so I was concentrating on not tearing their heads off and didn’t pay much attention to the beginning of the movie, but then a scene where a simple heist goes stupid bad grabbed my attention and I just kind of fell through the screen.
The movie’s about a man who works as a stunt driver by day and drives for criminals at night. Things start going wrong, then go wronger, pile up on him and pile up more until finally, halfway to a clear, cool morning, he bleeds to death from stab wounds in a Mexican bar. “There were so many other killings, so many other bodies,” he says in voice-over near the end, his own and the movie’s.
After lights came on, I sat in the theater till the cleaning crew, who’d been waiting patiently at the back with brooms and a trash can on rollers, came on in and got to work. I was remembering the car, his mention of Mexico, some of the conversation between my father and him.
I’m pretty sure it was him, his story—our visitor, my father’s old friend or coworker or accomplice or whatever the hell he was. I think that explains something.
I wish I knew what.
THE TRIPLE BLACK ’CUDA
by George Pelecanos
OF THE TWO of us, my brother, Ted, was the good one. I know my father felt that way, though he didn’t say it in my presence, at least not while Ted was alive. He didn’t have to say it, because I knew. Being second place in my father’s eyes was something I struggled with for a long time. I’m still carrying it, and I’m damn near sixty years old.
I grew up in a mostly white, leaning-to-ethnic neighborhood. Polish and Russian Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish Catholics, and a smattering of Protestants. No blacks or Spanish. Only a few of our fathers wore ties to work, but they all worked, and if the marriages were unhappy, as surely many of them were, most of the homes remained unbroken.
Pop was an auto mechanic at an Esso station a half mile from our house. He woke up early and read the newspaper, front to back, every morning before making sure we got off to school. Then he was on his feet all day, bent over, working under hoods in a to-the-bone cold garage. Which is why he already had arthritis and hip problems in his forties. At night he sat in his recliner, drank beer, smoked Viceroys, and read paperback novels. People assumed he wasn’t smart and paid him little attention until they needed him to work on their cars. Then he was their hero.
When I was still in high school, in the early seventies, Ted, who was three years my senior, enlisted in the Marine Corps and did a tour in Nam. The ground campaign was winding down, so the risk factor was not as high as it had been a few years earlier. It was a rite-of-passage thing for him. Also, our father had fought in the Pacific, and Ted knew that by serving he would make Pop proud. Pop was not a supporter of the war, or Nixon, but he thought even less of hippies and the protest movement, and gave Ted his blessing.
I was pissed off when Ted left for boot camp. I had never lived without him, and I felt that he had deserted me. Also, in the back of my mind, I knew that joining the Corps was another feather in his cap, something that my father would talk about with pride to his friends. Though I loved my brother, at that point in time I resented him a little bit too. I’m not proud of that, but there it is.
Ted had kept my wild streak in line when he was home, but when he headed overseas I went unchecked. I don’t mean to suggest that I was like those guys in my high school who carried knives and beat up weaklings. Most of those cretins dropped out before graduation, died on the highway, entered the penal system, or became career military and were never heard from again. That wasn’t me. But I did like to fight. Maybe because I was undersized, and I felt like I had something to prove. Whatever the reason, anger was my dominant mood. My fantasies, more often than not, involved violence rather than sex. How do I explain it? I was a boy and the wires inside my head were scrambled. I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. On top of that I liked fast cars.