Shane Finkelstein's Blog

Chapter 2


Charlie was short for Charlene, or at least that’s what she told Ira. At work she went by Rose because of the tattoo stretched across the inner part of her pasty thigh. She was from Gulfport, Mississippi, a senior in high school, just past eighteen, or so she said. Charlie spent her weekends in New Orleans, stripping at one of those dive clubs on Iberville between Chartres and Decatur.
They had met on the streetcar one day. She was sleeping with her legs tucked beneath her stretched out t-shirt, her head resting against the cold hard window. When she had opened her eyes, she caught Ira staring in her general direction. At his stop, the blonde-haired girl followed him from about twenty yards away until he had ducked beneath the entryway to his home. A few seconds later, an incessant knock battered the front door. Peering through a crack, Charlie offered Ira a blowjob for a place to sleep. Without waiting for an answer, she had brushed past Ira and plopped herself onto the sofa in the front room. His heart pulsed and his cheeks flushed from the home intrusion and the prospect of possible oral sex, so he hurried to the kitchen to catch his breath and fix a pot of coffee.
She was asleep, lying face down with one hand resting against the pine floor when he returned. Her acrid odor of sweat and cigarettes mixed with faint remnants of vanilla perfume reminded Ira of the inside of a teenager’s gym locker. It was just past noon when Charlie had come into his life, and it wasn’t until early the next morning when she had begun to stir awake. As the sun rose and the shadows crept up the cracked walls, Charlie moaned and cursed before noticing Ira in the rocking chair.
“Why you not wake me?” she asked.
“You looked tired,” he said.
“But I missed work,” she said. “They ain’t gone let me work tonight.”
“You can stay here, if you’d like.”
“You gone pay me?”
“For what?” Ira asked.
“My time.”
“I don’t have any money.”
Charlie looked around at the ornate crown molding on the high arched ceiling. The lush velvet curtain covering the massive window was torn at the top. The floral couch she was sitting on had stained cushions, the rug beneath her feet frayed edges and discoloration marks. The room was shroud in darkness interrupted only by a natural light shining through an oval stained glass window perched above the dark wooden staircase.
“You got anything to eat?” she asked.
“I have French bread.”
“That it?”
“And jam.”
Ira had hurried into the kitchen and exhaled for the first time since Charlie opened her piercing blue eyes. He grabbed the French bread off the Formica countertop and flexed his fingers, crushing the top of the bread a bit, testing it for freshness. He had picked it up the day before at the Leidenheimer factory on Simon Bolivar, where he went twice a week to schmooze the bakers into giving him the old bread before they discarded it in the trash. He usually froze one and ate the other with little packets of jam he got from the Best Western.
When he had returned to the living room, Charlie was looking at herself in the mirror, trying to mat down her crazy spiked hair. She turned and asked, “Got any eggs? I’m starving.”
“I do not.”
“Coffee?”
“A pot is brewing,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, still watching him through the reflection in the mirror, “I smell it.”
“Would you like to take a shower?” he asked.
“With you?”
Ira’s cheeks had turned the color of the Chinese flag and he spun his head around to avoid eye contact. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I could use a hot shower,” she said.
“There’s no hot water.”

Charlie had showered, drank three cups of coffee, and left that day, but she returned shortly after dawn the next morning, pounding her fists against the heavy wooden door. She was drunk, her eyes red and glossed over, her cheek showing signs of a light bruise. She had brushed past him with that same fetid odor, went straight to the couch and fell to sleep the instant her head hit the cushion. Ira wrapped a knit blanket over her body, and removed her damp thongs from her feet—beautiful, porcelain feet with hard dirty yellow calluses on her soles.

That was pretty much their routine over the past three months. Ira never knew exactly when the knock would come, but he found himself strangely aroused by the thought of this young girl tramping through the door and making herself at home in his huge empty house on St. Charles Avenue. She hadn’t stolen anything, hadn’t brought anyone back with her, and sometimes she had even contributed a few bars of soap or miniature shampoos culled from a stranger’s hotel room. Ira sat in his recliner and watched her breathing heavily through her tiny pug nose while he read his books. Sometimes they would head down to the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company and grab a free ice cream cone from the soft serve station by the front door, but more often than not she was like an outdoor cat that returned home to sleep whenever it felt like it.
They never talked about her life, about what she did all night in the French Quarter. She never mentioned her family or her friends or whom she lived with. One time she alluded to a boyfriend in Gulfport, some guy that worked in an auto body shop. She hadn’t talked about school or the prom or anything a normal high school senior would talk about. The conversations were more banal. They talked about the streetcar, about the ever-present construction or about the way some flowers would only bloom in the morning and others would only open at dusk. They were perfectly lonely companions on the opposite side of life’s trajectory contemplating how to survive in a material world without seeing a future past tomorrow.

Last Friday, Charlie had announced that she was on Spring Break and would therefore be spending the entire week in New Orleans. Apparently, Mardi Gras was a boon for the local stripping industry and Charlie had made just over two thousand dollars since the week began. When she came home that morning, she hadn’t even noticed Ira de-beading the bushes. She just wobbled up the short staircase, knocked on the door and twisted the doorknob at the same time, pushing her way into the foyer. Before he could say anything, she slammed the door shut, as he continued his work in the garden.
Ira had planned to sit in the rocker, read the rest of the paper and listen to her snoring on the sofa, but when he opened the door, Charlie wasn’t there. The kitchen was empty, as was the bathroom and office. He called her name a few times, listening to the slight echo bounce off the hardwood floor. A small pile of her dirty clothes lied next to the mahogany wooden end table.
Traversing the dark staircase, Ira called her name again. As far as he knew, Charlie had never been upstairs, but he began to pick up her scent as he opened his bedroom door. The room was undisturbed, the door to the bathroom closed. Ira walked unsteadily down the hallway checking the kid’s bedrooms, but only a layer of dust greeted him as he opened each door.
As he was about to concede and head down the stairs, he picked up that now-familiar scent. It was definitely coming from his bedroom so he opened the door, called out her name, slowly walked toward the bathroom and tapped lightly. No answer. Opening the door a crack, Ira saw Charlie submerged in the bathtub with just her nose peeking above the waterline. The first thought that crossed his mind was that Charlie had killed herself in his house and he would be blamed and spend the rest of his life in Folsom prison. That thought made Ira smash the door against the tile wall and stumble into the bathroom. Charlie jumped up so fast that the water cascaded over the edge of the tub and splashed to the ground. She vainly yelled his name as he stepped back and slammed the door, apologizing like a little boy who had walked in on his parents having sex.
“You’re not supposed to be up here,” Ira said loudly through the door.
“Sorry,” she yelled. “I thought you was gone for the day.”
“I guess it’s alright,” he said. “Sorry I walked in on you.”
“Give me a minute to get dressed, Ira. I want to take you to lunch.”
“You want to take me to lunch?”
“I’m hungry, Ira. And I’m tired of your jelly sandwiches.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I had a good night.”
“Save your money, honey.”
“No, really. I want to take you out. Where should we go?”
Still standing behind the door, Ira said, “You pick. It’s your money.”
“I don’t know. I ain’t never been to no place fancy. Maybe we should go to Ignatius. I hear they gots good gumbo.”
“I like gumbo.”
“You ain’t got to order just gumbo. You can order anything on the menu,” she said.
“I’ll change my shirt.”
Ira heard Charlie stand up in the bath and turn on the shower. She was whistling “Carnival Time” as everyone tended to do after hearing it so often during those past few weeks. He changed into a crinkled white dress shirt and headed downstairs to wait for her to change.

Chapter 1

Using a thick black rubber cane, Ira Silver stood on a stepladder reaching for a long strand of pink pearls caught in a thicket of branches just below the empty window box on the front of his three-story home on St. Charles Avenue. Swatting at what he thought was another mosquito, Ira felt an overgrown elephant ear tickling the crook of his knee.
It was unusually warm for Ash Wednesday, the air thick and moist. Ira’s cheeks were flushed and large drops of sweat cascaded down the side of his pocked forehead. Brownish grey spaghetti strands covering the large bald spot on the crown of his head fused with the dirt that fell from the limbs of the oak tree as he scowered the branches for more beads.
At the bottom of the ladder, six large trash bags were crammed with stuffed animals, plastic Chinese trinkets and hundreds of strands of cheap beads. Ira used to sell the beads back to the thrift store on Freret Street, but they stopped paying for them years ago. Instead the bags will sit in his front foyer for a week or two until Krispy Kreme has their donation day and Ira drags them to Metairie for a few dozen glazed donuts.
Ira had had quite the collection of ladders when his kids were around, but these days he has little use for them. This one was left in front of his house, lying against the black wrought iron fence, right where some inebriated father had left it on Fat Tuesday, awaiting irreverence by one of New Orleans’ finest. After picking the remaining beads out of the trees, Ira will roll the ladder down to Clement Hardware on Magazine Street, the only store in town that buys them back.
Ira was at the tail end of his latest gout flare up, which was the reason for the cane. After pestering strangers on the neutral ground for leftover burgers, wieners and beer during the first weekend of Mardi Gras parades, Ira had the all-too-familiar feeling of smoldering charcoal crystallizing in the bones around his left ankle. He had woken Sunday night still drunk, begging Charlie to roll him in a little red wagon down to Touro Hospital on Prytania Street. Touro during Carnival was an unpleasant place to be; six hours of degradation, dealing with miscreants and drunks, before Ira was finally allowed to see a doctor, only to be told that he was not sufficiently impaired as to receive free medical care.
Ira took it easy the rest of the week, only leaving his house in the mornings and when parades were over to empty the fishing net that he had fastened to a lawn chair with a sign that said “Hit Me.” When Ira’s parents lived there—and to a lesser extent when Lin and the kids were around—friends and friends of friends used to congregate on the front lawn and use the bathrooms, but it had been years since he had opened his home to those ne’er-do-wells. Besides, the last of his friends had stopped coming when Ira quit providing toilet paper and soap in the bathrooms.
With Mardi Gras over and the pain in his foot subsiding, Ira got back to his regular routine. He finished his clean up, took a cold shower, walked nine blocks to the Best Western next door to Superior Grill for the fresh pot of CC’s coffee brewing in the lobby. The police officer that had guarded the door and checked for wristbands the past week was long gone so Ira enjoyed his coffee without harassment. He liked this hotel in particular because they always had little packets of half and half and the pink sweetener that he craved. Most other places only had that disgusting powder non-dairy creamer and sugar packets, and he couldn’t stand either of those.
The only pain commensurate with the gout was the feeling that Ira got when he didn’t inject his brain with a shot of caffeine in the morning. With the Best Western guarded all week by that resident cop, Ira found himself at the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company drinking Fanta and Barq’s root beer out of a thirty-two ounce Styrofoam cup every morning. With turnover in the service industry sector at inscrutable rates, no one ever questioned Ira’s intentions, even though he was there every day drinking out of the same cup.
With the Best Western back to its normal schedule on Ash Wednesday, Ira waded through a throng of tourists rolling overstuffed suitcases through the lobby, greeted the front desk manager, and spied two pieces of king cake in a plain white cardboard box on the counter next to a coffee urn. It was almost sacrilegious to eat king cake after Mardi Gras, but cream cheese filling was Ira’s favorite, so he took one piece and folded it into a plain white napkin and ate the other.
Ira was disappointed to find eight-ounce coffee cups on the counter instead of the usual twelve-ounce, but the coffee was hot, and he wasn’t paying three dollars a cup like people do at the CC’s on Magazine Street. With the smaller cup, though, Ira had to stay around longer than usual so he could refill twice before leaving. He hated walking with two cups of coffee because he always ended up wearing half a cup on his shirtsleeve, so Ira stood against the wall and chatted with strangers drinking coffee before leaving town.
Bob and Lisa, a middle-aged couple from Des Moines, were arguing about his cell phone, lost in the fracas on Bourbon Street the night before. Lisa wore dark sunglasses and a purple cowboy hat, and spoke like a TV news anchor, while Bob continued on about the conundrum of losing all his contacts. Stan the man in the cheap grey suit and black wingtips, droned on about the difficulties of getting a decent night sleep on Fat Tuesday. Three girls in sorority sweatshirts giggled and gossiped about the boys they met on Spring Break.
With his caffeine fix sufficiently fulfilled, Ira thought he would head toward home to work on the summer edition of The New Orleans Jewish Monthly. After twenty-three years of publishing, he was perfectly aware that most of his clients had left for the gulf beaches, but Ira would be remiss if he didn’t make a few sales calls and work on an article or two before the weekend. There hadn’t been a new advertiser in the paper since the fall, and Ira blamed the lack of interest on the Internet and the average person’s inability to sustain a succinct thought for the duration of a thousand-word newspaper article.
With sales being so slow, Ira had been relying more and more on the Crescent City Trade card. Ever since he stopped printing monthly, right around the economic collapse of 2009, most of his current advertisers refused to part with cash for an ad, but they had been more willing to barter. Ira loved that trade card; there were over a dozen restaurants in the uptown area that took it, but a couple of them didn’t let him use it anymore. They said he didn’t tip enough, and tipping was mandatory on the trade card. But it wouldn’t be a tip if he had to pay, would it? That was why the pizza guy didn’t come anymore. Ira would order Pepperoni’s Pizza at least twice a week, but the last time the delivery guy told him they wouldn’t deliver for free anymore. They stopped answering his calls. They must have had caller I.D.
Ira didn’t have caller I.D. He had foregone most modern amenities, usually due to the exorbitant costs, and caller I.D. on a landline was no exception. Ira preferred his unlimited local and long distance plan that cost nineteen dollars per month, and included an Earthlink dial-up Internet connection. Paying for Internet bothered Ira more than anything because he used to get free hi-speed wi-fi before his neighbor’s started blocking with passwords. Whenever he had a large file to download, he had to beg a neighbor for their password, but invariably they would change it within a week or two.
Before leaving the Best Western, Ira grabbed a copy of the Times Picayune off the front desk. The desk clerk had already returned from church and wore the ash mark in the center of his forehead for proof. Ira nodded at the man, but he couldn’t help but stare at the grey thumbprint that signaled his devotion to Jesus Christ. It was one of those not-so-subtle reminders that he was a Jew in a Christian city.
Reading the daily newspaper used to be ritual for Ira, but now he only gets to do it on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays because some out of town conglomerate decided that New Orleans was no longer worthy of daily news. He loved the crossword puzzles and the funnies, and although they doubled them up in the three papers, it just wasn’t the same. It used to be that every day between nine and ten, Ira could find a nice spot in the park or on his recliner and do his puzzles. Now he didn’t really know what to do with himself in the mornings.
On the walk back, Ira passed his house and headed for the Jewish Community Center. Mother and Father had kept their JCC membership all these years. They thought Ira worked out at the gym and they wanted him to keep in shape, still hoping that he would make the acquaintance of another woman, this time a Jewish one. But the last time Ira hit the weight room, his muscles were so deficient that he was unable to get through any exercise without writhing in an inexorable pain. On occasion, Ira might go for a swim in the lap pool or use the sauna, but more often than not, he used the gym for the hot showers or to watch TV.
Heating and cooling a five thousand square foot house was very expensive. When Lin and the boys were there and they shared the house with Mother and Father, Entergy had cost nearly six hundred dollars per month during the summer. So the last few years, Ira had been turning off the hot water heater to save on electricity. It worked out great. Last month, the Entergy bill was forty-seven dollars. It was better in the summer because cold showers were nice, but during the winter, Ira took his hot showers over at the JCC.
Ira had already taken his cold shower that morning, but he wanted to catch up on the stock market and read the newspaper. In the men’s locker room, the black leather couch was empty and the TV was showing highlights of the latest sporting event. He had no taste for sports, so he commandeered the remote control and turned on CNBC to watch the ticker scroll the latest stock quotes across the screen. The gym was bustling with middle aged Jews working off the beer and king cake from the past few weeks. Grabbing a pencil from his locker, Ira returned to the couch, spread the newspaper across the empty seat and started in on the day’s crossword puzzle.
Ira knew most of the people that worked out at the gym. Most of the men he could tell you their penis size, if that was something you cared to know. Over the hour and thirty minutes that he sat there with the stock ticker streaming through his peripheral vision, he struck up five or six banal conversations, most of which included some kind of Mardi Gras story. Jonathan Frankel, who sold advertising for the weekly rag, The Gambit, asked Ira if he was going to the grand opening party for Square Root on Saturday night. He assured him that he was even though this was the first he was hearing about it. Sometimes he got invitations to these events, but when he didn’t, he just showed up, claimed his invitation got lost in the mail and flashed his business card. More often than not, it got him in the door.
With lunchtime approaching, Ira decided it was time to get his day started. He figured Charlie would have woken up by then, and he had something very important to discuss with her. As he exited the side entrance of the JCC, he heard the glug and whine of the streetcar approaching the intersection of Jefferson and St. Charles. He limp ran to the next stop where the conductor held the door an extra few seconds so that Ira could board. He swiped his RTA card and paid the forty-cent disability fare before finding an empty seat next to a large black woman who was wearing curlers and a shower cap and staring out the window.