The taxi had yet to
come to a full stop under the canopy of Busan's Paradise Hotel
when Ray "No Relation But Thanks for Asking" Mancini
touched down. Some twenty-four hours had trickled by since he'd
boarded his first flight in Toronto and now here he was, ten o'clock
at night in the heart of what his Vegas contact had pitched to
him with a straight face as "The Korean Riviera".
But Ray didn't look
happy. I watched him lean into the night scenery in his characteristic
pose, feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, the weight
of him shifting rhythmically from foot to foot. His eyes were
dancing around, and I had a pretty good idea what he was thinking.
No one had bothered to fill him in, it's safe to say, on the four
pillars of Korean architecture,
I. a shade of pastel
that was never in fashion can't go out of it;
II. a line is either
straight or out of whack;
III. if it's not a
right angle it must be a wrong angle;
and IV. where three
buildings would fit, put up ten.
Now I had no intention
of going out to greet Ray, but all the same it felt good to see
the old guy again. He was decked out to the nines, as per usual--in
a well-cut slate-gray suit he'd probably never worn before and
probably never would again, and handmade wingtips whose price
tag, if I knew him at all, must have rivaled his return airfare--but
none of that did a thing to his face. He still had that same
fierce bug-eyed look on him (one of my buddies had once described
it as "Al Pacino with his face shoved into a windowpane");
and the cramped, boxy urban landscape was obviously doing nothing
to soften him up.
"That is your
father, yes?" This from my occasional business partner,
one ( that's Saw
Oo Chic to you). Oo Chic is a dapper, frighteningly well-connected
Korean dude with the best poker face I've ever seen--and in this
country I've seen a few.
"Oh, yeah, "
I said, "that's him. Go ahead before he sees me."
*
* *
It was on a Saturday--June
22, 2002, to be precise about it--that Ulganov got the idea for
the fight. We had just finished watching the Korea-Spain World
Cup soccer game in his dive when the Russky, suddenly up a small
fortune from the outcome, got going on the topic of referees.
"Those guys perrr-feck!"
he began. "Those guys perrr-feck!" he ended.
Ulganov had two things
going for him: unlimited drive and a gift for minimalist speech.
You could never get anything on him by taping what he said, and
yet everybody got his point. Other than that he was a fat, smelly,
stubble-headed pig of a guy who looked like he was crowding sixty,
although he could have been forty for all anyone knew (some of
those guys age awfully quick). He loved his woodka and he loved
his coven, and he ritually pushed both on his friends the way
most people might push a book or a movie--with the exception that
most people don't usually insist on watching you read or take
in the flick.
And it was a movie
that got the ball rolling. Ulganov himself had never seen the
(a?) movie; but I had, and even if all the particulars of a given
idea came from other heads (that never failed) Ulganov could always
be nudged towards the belief that the idea was his own. What
you did was, you lined up the details as dots on an imaginary
straight line and kept stuffing the line with more and more details
until the Russky clicked. This was tedious but necessary work,
as Ulganov never invested in other people's schemes.
"Look at those
crowds," Oo Chic was cooing. "Just look at those crowds.
Korea has never been this proud of itself."
The soccer game over,
we were now treated to televised studies in red. Mobs of mind-warping
proportions had flooded the streets of Seoul, every man, woman
and child clad in the thematic crimson T-shirt, and the effect
of watching all that partying was exhilarating enough to stimulate
the beginnings of a thought, even after way too much of Ulganov's
dubious woodka.
"Did you see
that new movie by what's-his-name," I said to Oo Chic, "the
one about Kim Deuk-Gu?"
Oo Chic had. "Now
there was a true Korean hero," he gushed. "A
great boxer."
"Cut down in
his prime," I said.
"He should be
avenged," Oo Chic grumbled.
"Redeemed,"
I said.
"Killed by an
ugly American," Oo Chic raged.
"Ray 'Boom Boom'
Mancini," I said.
"Boom Boom,"
Oo Chic sneered. "What kind of a name is Boom Boom?"
"Ray Mancini,"
I said. "You know, that's actually my father's name, believe
it or not. And he used to be a fighter, too."
"Really?"
Oo Chic hiccupped. "Was he also a great boxer?"
"They say he was
pretty good. He never lost, if that means anything."
"Wow."
"But he walked
away after only seven fights. He's a referee, these days."
"A referee?"
"Sure. World
class, too."
"No!" Oo
Chic looked properly astonished. At least I think he did; he
meant to, in any case. "That's incredible!" he crooned.
We went at it like
this for some time, Oo Chic and I. It took some doing, as always,
but, in time, we heard the click.
*
* *
It was close to thirty
years since Ray “No Relation” Mancini had last sprung from his
ring-corner stool: in the first round, on his way to greeting
Danny "Golden Boy" Frechette with two sharp exploratory
jabs, a punishing combination and an unforgiving left hook. The
fight had taken up some 14 seconds of Ray's time and he'd jogged
home with two thousand bucks in the back pocket of his jeans.
Just like that. He was nineteen-years old at the time, he had
a 7-0 record, all of them by k.o., and he never fought again.
He would have liked
to fight again. But then there was a problem with a girl, and
pretty soon there was bigger problem with the girl’s father, and
in time there was this really heated problem with a half dozen
expertly swung baseball bats, and Ray had an epiphany: Why not
marry the girl, settle down and sell insurance instead?
In the intervening
thirty years, Ray had waded through a lot of bullshit; too much
by half, he would have been the first to say. But because there
was money in it on one side, and a quick-fingered and very greasy
father-in-law on the other, he somehow made it work.
The lowlifes helped--not
the insurance lowlifes, but the real ones. Ray somehow surreptitiously
wormed his way back into the boxing game, first by getting a one-time
gig as a ref, and then by getting another, and eventually by getting
a lot more, until he was a WB* staple for their championship fights.
He would tell you that that's what kept him sane.
Until now. Here he
was, fresh off the plane in South fuckin Korea, to referee his
first non-title bout in twelve years. He was kicking himself.
"Mista Ray Mancini?"
he heard. The words were fighting their way to him through a
brisk November wind that whistled, it seemed, right through Ray's
head. "Mista Ray Mancini the boxing referee?"
Groggy as hell but
trained all the same to act quick on his feet, Ray wheeled about,
registered a smiling, dapper, tow-headed Korean, maybe
a welterweight, looked around some more, and with a measure of
reluctance admitted, "Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's me."
"I'm very happy
to meet you sir. This boxing event is very important in my country.
Mista Ulganov would have come to meet you himself but--"
"Never heard of
him. What is he, Russian? Is he the guy that's paying me?"
Ray took a deep quizzical breath, closed his eyes and frowned.
"Smells like shit around here," he said. He shook his
head. "So who's paying me? You?"
"I.... Yes."
"Fantastic. Any
time's good. What'd you say your name was?"
But Ray wasn't listening.
He did manage a short nod, but the nod was for himself. Look
as he might he couldn't really see anything that he hadn't already
seen too much of on the cab ride from the airport. The streets
around the hotel were lined with the same concrete boxes and the
concrete boxes themselves flecked with the same lit-up plastic
boxes. And there was something like a godzillion Koreans milling
around everywhere. Riviera my ass.
Ray gave up on the
scenery and looked at the hotel. The dapper Korean dude was jabbering
away and Ray felt tired and dizzy. He couldn't have made much
sense of the words that were coming at him now if he'd tried,
and he wasn't trying. His body wanted to get drunk but his head
didn't--or maybe it was the other way around. "So,"
he said, filling a pause in the Korean dude's gobblygook, "why
do I want to see that, Whatshisname, that Russian guy?
The hotel had come
highly recommended. Ray had his doubts, but looking at the structure
he quickly understood that by limiting his field of vision to
it he might be able to convince himself that he was at least in
Hartford, or at the very least in Edmonton.
"Well,"
he declared, looking straight ahead and springing for the hotel's
revolving doors, "it ain't Italy."
*
* *
The Ray I knew growing
up never cared for bullshit or for talking just to hear the sound
of his own voice. Also, he was nothing if not ethnically aware.
To wit: he never insured a souvlaki place without giving it the
Greek endorsement (no hold-up coverage); he always gave "Pakkis"
and "Chinks" calling for auto insurance the highest
available quote, plus a 100% broker's fee (effectively sending
them across the street to some other agency); he never, ever sold
life insurance to blacks; and he always insisted, before agreeing
to service a fellow greaseball wop's insurance needs, on giving
said greaseball a brief and altogether to-the-point sit-down talk
in his office. And, as Ray liked to remind any would-be liberal
critic, "I got the best loss ratio in town."
Ray "No Relation"
Mancini was bringing this--his plain speech, his ethnic awareness--to
bear on the task of making sense of his current assignment. He
was in Korea, ostensibly, to referee a commemorative fight held
on the twentieth anniversary of a contest in which his namesake
had pummeled a popular Korean folk-hero right into a coma, and
by way of that coma unto death itself.
"Pretty fuckin
morbid, if you ask me," Ray told his host. "And I don't
make the cut as hero here, either, you'll notice."
Ray and the dapper
Korean were no longer in the safe haven of the Paradise Hotel
but in some weird girly bar-cum-brothel off a seedy alley called,
of all things, "Texas street". Ray'd barely had time
for a shower before being whisked away, and now, after the walk
up this alley, this Texas street that smelled of raw sewage and
was thronged with an unsuspected number of foreigners (sailors
and whores was Ray's guess), he had to admit he felt a hankering
for more Koreans.
A hankering for one
more Korean, anyway. Back at the hotel Ray had shared an elevator
ride up to the seventh floor with a comely Korean angel who, without
breathing a word to him, without even deigning to look in his
direction or otherwise acknowledge his very real presence in a
very real confined space, had completely redefined Ray's notion
of how perfect a creature a woman could be. By some buried reflex
he never would have guessed at he'd closed his eyes and breathed
her in, right there in the elevator, every last molecule of her
scent. Then he heard a Ding!, opened his eyes and followed
the girl out of the elevator. But he'd forgotten where he was
going. He stood there in the middle of the long corridor, staring
dumbly at his room-keycard and listening to the slushing of blood
in his ears. It took some time before he could ascertain that
he was on the right floor. This was very uncharacteristic behavior
on Ray's part.
"Nonsense, nonsense,"
burped Ray's Texas street host. He was a burly, stinky, stubble-headed
Russian who called himself Anton Something, and he was very, very
drunk. "It's perrr-feck! Ray Mancini! It's perrr-feck!"
Ray turned to the dapper
Korean, whose name for some reason Ray's brain simply refused
to record (he'd asked about five times thus far and felt that
to keep asking would work against politeness, not to mention his
cherished economy of speech). "What do you think,
my friend? Precisely how is this perfect?"
Ray'd come to think
that this dapper Korean dude might be good for critical information
in a pinch, mostly on the evidence of his entirely volunteered
statement earlier regarding the woman who'd ridden in the elevator
with Ray. The Korean had given the mortifying explanation that
the woman in question existed in the real world beyond Ray's imagination
as the wife of the Korean fighter now being billed as Kim Deuk
Gu's avenger. The “redeemer," the dapper Korean dude had
said, if Ray's memory served.
The dapper, impossibly-named
Korean presently gave Ray a flat smile and nothing but. Or maybe
there had been a flicker and it had eluded Ray. It was dark as
hell in that place, for one thing, and beyond the self-evident
truth that he would never have sold the guy any car insurance,
Ray had no idea how far he might be able to trust this dapper
dude. Ditto for the Russian: Russians Ray knew tended to self-insure
or, worse still, operate insurance scams of their own.
"Right. Next
question." Ray took his time, staring down in turn both
the big Russian and the dapper Korean. Ray had an intense set
of large brown eyes that was particularly well-suited to this
sort of thing. "And no bullshit, now, boys," Ray said.
He sighed for effect, then plunged on: "Is the fix in here?"
Anton let rip a big
laugh and threw up his hands. "Of course!" he bellowed.
"Of course! I tell you! It's perrr-feck!" Anton roared,
coughed and wheezed, paused, roared, coughed and wheezed. In
the throes of these convulsions, under Ray's watchful eye, a stubby
sausage of a forefinger made its bouncy way from Anton's lap to
a call-button on the wall. "And now you meet my girrr-lz!
I got Russky, I got Korean, I got Filipina! Anything you want!"
Laugh, cough, wheeze. "Ray Mancini! Perrr-feck!"
*
* *
From across the room
at Charlie's, the Paradise Hotel's cozy downstairs bar, my girlfriend
and I sat watching Ray "No Relation". Ray was by himself
at the far end of the bar, nursing a drink I knew to be a double
scotch and (based on Oo Chic's detailed info) pondering his earlier
failure to perform. Silly pop music and the multilingual buzz
of surrounding conversations washed over him; you could almost
see the poor guy's chest filling with cold dread.
*
* *
It was midnight Korean
time. By the reckoning of Ray's gold ballpoint on the complimentary
napkin he'd been up for 33 hours. No wonder, then.
He shook his head.
Physical fatigue had nothing to do with that and he knew it.
He knew it. "Christ," he muttered, standing up from
his barstool with the vague intention of going up to his room.
"Christ."
When he turned on his
heels he came face to face with the angel. That should have surprised
him but it didn't, not exactly, and as he basked in the flush
that spread through his chest and limbs he knew it even more,
that physical fatigue had had nothing to do with whatever had
happened, or had not happened, on Texas street.
The angel spoke. In
English. "You're the referee," she said.
"Right."
His temples echoed like banged gongs inside his head, but he felt
pretty calm. So: here she was, of her own free will, and she
spoke English, and she knew who he was. All good.
The angel spoke again.
"Ray Mancini," she said. "Is that your real name?"
"Sure."
Looking at her he tried to separate her component parts; he found
it hard work. She looked very Asian, was his first insight: a
doll's face, all in delicately chiseled features, which until
now, until being this dangerously exposed to one, his body had
never manifested the slightest interest in. But now manifestations
were occurring for sure and he thought it prudent to sit back
down. He gestured (awkwardly, it seemed to him, although he was
pretty sure he felt no nervousness) in the direction of the next
stool. "Would you like to join me?"
By way of answer she
graced the proffered stool, the smell of her as she descended
wafting once again right into Ray's flat receptive nose. "Thank
you," she said.
To believe that this
woman had no awareness of the effect she was having on him lay
somewhere, probably quite far, beyond the reach of Ray's powers.
And yet, taken simply on the strength of her expression and body
language, she obviously had no clue that this flat-faced,
pug-nosed, middle-aged foreigner was going out of his woppy mind
for her.
Hey, but obvious was
not what Ray was looking for here. He was just busy telling himself,
while subterraneously working out what to say next, that he must
have felt this foolish at some point before in his life, although
he could not have sworn to the fact, let alone say when; and telling
himself also that this woman not only knew how he felt but by
some miracle actually felt the same way.
"And you're the
redeemer's wife," he said. He offered her a drink.
Which, brazenly, she
accepted. She gave him an honest-to-God smile, and said, "That's
right. I'm the redeemer's wife. I married the redeemer."
"And so? Did
he redeem you?"
She laughed, her pale
skin rather aglow in the contrast with those jet-black brows,
lashes, that perfectly straight, waist-length hair. "Oh-my-God,
no," she said. She had a mouth on her like a ripe fruit.
"Oh, no. No, no."
That mouth bespoke
possibilities from which Ray now forced his mind to recoil. But
she was tall, thin, leggy, and she smelled--divine.
*
* *
Forty-six hours later
they were heading into the eighth round and things were going
from bad to worse for the redeemer. His combinations were not
working, his jab missed its target more often than not, and he
was taking some serious licks. Simply put, he'd already gotten
knocked down six times.
But he was hanging
in there, the redeemer was, and Ray was letting them fight. They
were lightweights, after all, and Ray had his own ideas about
the way those little monkeys flailed about at each other.
For one thing, he seriously
doubted the ability of two 135-pound men with padded gloves to
inflict serious harm on each other. In his educated judgment
when those guys went down they dropped from exhaustion--not
from being properly clocked the way, say, Ray himself had once
clocked his opponents.
Of course exhaustion
could be a killer in the ring. Twenty years earlier to the day,
in the opening seconds of the fourteenth round, Ray had watched
exhaustion sneak up on Kim Deuk Gu, cold-cock him and leave him
for dead.
"Don't worry,"
Ray had told the angelic So Young (that was actually her name,
and she had a sister called Sue Me!) across his pillow
two nights before. "I won't let it get that far with your
husband if it comes to that. And it won't come to that."
"But you don't
understand," she said, suddenly sitting bolt upright on the
bed. "I don't want you to stop the fight. I know him.
He got knocked down eight times in one fight and then he came
back and he knocked the other boxer out. Please, don't stop it.
Please. Promise me."
She was persuasive,
he was smitten within an inch of his life, and he promised all
the things she asked him to promise and several more (too many
more!) that she never asked him to promise at all.
Pop! and down
again went the redeemer. Ray was all over it. "Count fast,"
Anton had instructed; "Count slowly," So Young had pleaded.
Ray counted in what seemed to him his normal fashion, although,
maybe, it could have been a tad slow. The redeemer pushed himself
on his feet, on Nine, weathered more punishment and finally reached
the shore as the bell rang to signal the end of the eighth. Ray
had to (discreetly) point the guy in the direction of his corner.
To even begin to compare
this bout with that other one is just plain stupid, Ray kept telling
himself. Helping him to his corner he'd noticed the narrow slits
that were now the redeemer's eyes, and he'd caught himself thinking
about the doctor. But then there was So Young, he could just
make her out through the glare of the lights, and he decided that
he couldn't remember how narrow those slits had been to begin
with.
Then came the ninth-round
bell. Oscar "Bonecrusher" Haynes (hahaha, thought Ray)
jumped out of his stool and, in a felicitous moment, showed Ray
that he at least still had some wit, if not wits, about him.
Haynes, a wiry and battle-scarred wrong-side-of-the-tracks Philly
black dude, 12-7 going in, danced his way quickly over to the
other corner, from which the redeemer was now slowly extricating
himself, removed his mouthpiece, and shouted, "Ask not for
who that bell tolls, motherfucker!"
What happened next
is still a matter of some debate--the bout was not televised or
filmed in any way--but suffice it to say that it happened very
quickly and that the upshot of it was not at all good for Haynes.
Not good for his teeth, anyway, several of which lay on the mat
next to his head. But Haynes didn't die: there was that. And
the redeemer had redeemed. There was certainly that, too.
When Ray held up the
redeemer's glove and the p.a. system announced the winner the
crowd erupted, with So Young front and center. Ray had to fight
an urge to keep pulling up the redeemer's gloved hand, way up
until those tiny feet of his had cleared the mat for all to see.
Well, maybe not for all to see, but that's how it would
have happened, if it had.
*
* *
"I'm not sure
things can ever be the same between us," I said to So Young
the night before the fight.
"I'm all for
improvement," was what she said.
"'I'm all for
improvement.' Where'd you learn to talk like that? And to do
these things? Have you no shame?"
"You're joking,
right?"
"What if I'm
not?"
"What about you?"
she said. "Your own father."
"My own father's
pretty happy right now, I would think. Not that I'd want him
to be, the bastard, but that's neither here nor there. This is
about you and me. I mean, how could you? The guy's like, a million
years old."
"He's in pretty
good shape."
"I don't believe
this."
"Look, you asked
me to do it," she said.
"Yes," I
said, "but you were supposed to say no."
"Ah."
"No shit. This
was a test, So Young, and I'm sorry to say it, you failed miserably."
"You know,"
So Young said, "somehow I don't think this is about you and
me at all. I think this is totally about you and your father."
"Me and
my father?" I said.
Twenty years earlier,
minus a week or so, I had answered the phone and found myself
speaking with Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali's longtime coach and
arguably the best ever, a legend to anyone who knew anything about
boxing. Because Ray had seen the Kim-Mancini fight ringside the
great man was calling to get his take on what had happened. "Fuckin
thing was a mismatch from the get-go," I heard Ray say to
Angelo Dundee. I'd seen the bout myself, on tv, and I'd been
dying to pepper Ray with questions as soon as he came home--but
as usual he had nothing to say to me.
"I mean, there's
Boom Boom, right?" Ray said the next day, on the phone this
time with Jake LaMotta. "Steps up with a no-bullshit 19-1
record, and then there's that Duck Gook, and what the fuck's he
ever done? Christ, what is he, anyway? King of the universe
in Shittown, Korea?" There came a pause, then Ray charged
on. "Whaddya mean!" he thundered. "Look at Boom
Boom! Fourteen knockouts, eight of 'em in the first round, for
Chrissake, and the other six in the second! A lightweight, for
Chrissake!"
The fact that my own
father could talk this way to Jake LaMotta blunted the edge of
every cutting remark he'd thrown at me since I was born. LaMotta's
star, never very bright before (he was a lowlife's lowlife), had
risen incalculably in the wake of a Martin Scorcese movie about
his life that had made everyone's A-list a couple of years earlier.
Robert De Niro had played LaMotta--turning in, arguably, his best
performance in a long career of knock-out performances (he was
a shoo-in for the oscar)--and LaMotta, digging the attention for
sure, soon found himself in the new and enviable position of being
able to hand-pick his friends. And he had hand-picked my dad!
"Boom Boom lost
to Alexis Arguello," I had the temerity to say to Ray at
the dinner table about a week later. At the time I was maybe
the staunchest nine-year-old boxing fan in the world. "And
Alexis Arguello knocked Boom Boom out in the fourteenth round,
too," I said, as if the symmetry somehow proved something--although,
in the way of a nine-year-old, I wasn't too sure what.
Ray didn't think I
was so smart. "Oh yeah?" he said, "and what the
fuck do you know about Alexis Arguello? Nothing, that's
what."
"Ray?" my
mother (meekly) said. "Please?"
"What!"
"Please?"
"Yeah, yeah.
All right. Listen to me, kid, and listen good. Everybody loses
to Arguello. You got that? Everybody. I've refereed a couple
of his fights and I can tell you for free. Arguello, he's a fuckin
surgeon in that ring."
I knew--and, improbably,
Ray didn’t--that two days before the Kim-Mancini bout, in the
fourteenth round for good measure, Aaron Pryor had knocked out
Alexis Arguello. Pryor would now forever be my favorite fighter.
"I don't want
to talk about my father any more," I said to So Young. "Let's
talk about you and me. About the future."
"What do you
mean?"
"You know what
I mean."
"I'm already
married," she said.
"'I'm already
married,' she says. So Young, your husband likes guys, for Christ's
sake."
"That always worked
in your favor before. And mine too, probably."
"I swear, I'll
never understand this country."
"You mean me.
You'll never understand me."
"You, Korea,
all of it."
"Look, I like
you. I really like you. But you're an English teacher, you know
what I mean? And you're a foreigner. My parents would kill me."
Slowly she slid one
graceful forefinger across her milky, fragrant throat, and that
killed any hope for further debate.
*
* *
Ray stood just outside
the Paradise Hotel's revolving doors listening to the dapper Korean's
goodbyes. The weather had turned cold in the last couple of days,
but the sun was coming up now and for the first time since he'd
spent a week any place far away from home Ray felt in no rush
to get back to the office. He looked out at the boxy buildings.
The rising sun shone pinkly on them and Ray guessed that one could
get used to them, if one had to. Ray said, "Why didn't Anton
buy the redeemer?"
The dapper Korean gave
him his flat smile. He had a nice overcoat on and he looked pleasantly
warm. "I think somebody went and pissed off the redeemer.
What do you think?"
Ray smiled. "I’m
guessing Anton took a bath," he said.
"One man's bath
is another man's watershed." The dapper Korean looked up
into the sky's changing color. "You know," he said,
"it's been a good year for Korea. For Busan. First the
World Cup, then the Asian Games, and now this."
"Yeah," Ray
mused. "And now this."
"I'll say goodbye
to So Young for you, okay?"
"Sure thing.
See you around." He watched the departing dapper dude's
overcoat disappear into the Paradise Hotel's revolving doors,
and just then, from out those same doors, there popped a blimp
that Ray knew well. "Gino Dellapina!" he said. "You
dirty greaseball wop, I'd recognize that waddle anywhere. What
the fuck you doing here?"
Gino was wheezing away.
"Whaddaya mean?" he said. "I was a fuckin judge
on dat fight. Whaddayou, stoopid and blind?"
"I must be if
I didn't see you. You're a fuckin elephant. So, you get your
money from Anton or what?"
"Fuckin Russians,
don't get me started." He paused and wheezed. Steam was
coming out of his mouth and out of his coat. "But hey, it
was a week away from da wife, right? Da hotel was so-so, da broads
was nasty, but hey, it was a week away from da wife."
"Gotta count your
blessings," Ray said.
"Fuckin A."
His wheezing gave no sign of being brought under control and Gino
started looking around for a place to sit. "Hey," he
said, "you goin out to da airport now? Wanna share a cab?"
From a second-floor
window I watched the two men walk up to a waiting taxi. The driver
hurried out to help with the bags and open the door for them.
Ray opened the front
door instead. Then he took in the puzzled look on Gino's face.
"What?” he said. “I ain't ridin in the back witchoo, you
fat fuck."
"Yeah, yeah,"
Gino wheezed. "Ya know," he said, "I ain't gonna
miss dis place. Dis whole country smells like shit."
"Sure," Ray
said, trying to make up his mind once and for all about the boxy
buildings. "But the women smell great. Come to think of
it it is kind of like Italy. Except in reverse."
They were in the taxi
maybe fifteen seconds before the windows were completely fogged
over. “Naturally it’s in reverse,” Gino said. “It’s on da odder
side a da fuckin world!”
*
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