Driver

Driver - Chapter 13

The son of a bitch was beginning to piss him off.

Bernie Roth came out of the diner picking his teeth. He tossed the fortune cookie in the dumpster. Even if the damn thing told the truth who in their right mind would want to know.

As he sat in his car seat, he saw the food coupon left by Danny on his steering wheel. He took a look at it, mumbled another set of expletives and balled it in the direction of the fortune cookie.

The picture of the pizza on the coupon aroused his hunger again. It did not matter that he just finished a meal. That was Bernie Roth; always hungry for more. Be it power, money, or food.

Pizza. Right.

Bernie drove home to Campton City, a place not far from the old MGM Hollywood studios. The studio had left its days of old school moviemaking behind and had now been acquired by Sony-Columbia.

Bernie had used one of the old studio props as his the entrance to his house. Thing reminded you of entering a restricted sanctuary. Benji, the guard at the door looked like its official caretaker. One hand wrapped around a hamburger and two fingers of the other raised in greeting Mr. Bernie as his car entered through the gates. Bernie gave him a thumbs-up reply wondering why he even needed a caretaker of the house in the first place.

It’s not like anybody didn’t know who owned the place. But times had changed. And now a rookie driver kid was threatening to come after him.

Someone had shoved up a dozen pizza ads under his door. Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Rome Village, Mother’s, Hunky Dory Quik Ital…who would even name their place like that he thought. Someone pulled off the pizza ad off every house in the neighborhood and circled the words “Free Delivery” on each of them.

Threats he thought had become more cryptic these days. Earlier it would be a sliced finger left at the door for touching someone else’s woman. Sometimes a human tongue for ratting out to the cops or becoming an undercover snitch.

But “Free Delivery?”. You’d need to have a sense of context to even understand what was the message being sent across to you.

Bernie poured himself a scotch and sank into his swayback sofa. Kept right alongside his sofa was a chair that he paid more than a thousand dollars for. It was supposed to correct all your back problems. But Bernie could hardly stand the feel let alone the sight of that damn thing. Sitting in it you felt like you were in the hands of an overgrown catcher’s mitt. So though he had it for more than a year, it still smelled new, smelled like a new car. This smell he liked.

Suddenly he felt tired.

The next door neighbors were at it again. He sat listening and had another scotch before he decided enough was enough. He had seen them going at it in Nino’s diner too earlier and just couldn’t figure out how much could two people disagree on something. Anything.

He rose from his sofa and knocked over at the house next door.

“Yeah?”

Jimmy was a short-faced man who it seemed would carry his baby-fat with him to the grave.

“Bernie Roth from next door.”

“I know, I know. What’s up? I am kind of busy here,” replied Jimmy.

“I heard.”

With this Jimmy’s eyed changed and he tried to close the door. But Bernie had reached up and grasped the edge. Jimmy got even more red-faced trying to shove it close. But Bernie held it easily. The muscles on his arm stood out like bundles of cables. Jimmy’s baby-fat fat was no match here.

After a moment he swung the door open.

“What the−”

“You all right, Shonda?” asked Bernie.

She nodded without meeting his eyes. At least the violence had not gotten to the physical stage this time. Perhaps he had arrived earlier. A little later and Shonda would need a few band-aids to cover her newer bruises.

“You can’t−”

Bernie clamped his hand on his neighbor’s throat before he could finish his sentence.

Bernie said, “I am a patient man. Not much for getting in other people’s way. What I figure is we’ve all got out own lives right? And the right to be left alone. So I sit over there for almost a year now listening to what goes on down in here, and I keep thinking ‘Hey, he’s a grown man, he’ll work it out.’ You’re gonna work it out, right Jimmy? ”

Bernie rocked his hand at the wrist in his hand and caused Jimmy’s head to nod in his approval.

He added more, “Shonda’s a good woman. You’re lucky to have her, lucky she’s put up with you this long. Lucky I’ve put up with you this long. She has good reason: she loves you. I don’t have any reason at all.”

“Well, that was stupid,” Bernie thought as he returned to his own apartment and poured another scotch.

It was now quiet next door. The swayback couch welcomed him as it always did. The thousand dollar chair on the other hand sat empty, smelling like a new car like it always did.

Had he left the TV on? He didn’t recall ever turning it on at all, but there it was, unspooling one of those court shows currently fashionable on the television circuit. Judge Somebody-or-another, judges reduced to caricature participant who was either so stupid that he jumped at the chance to broadcast his stupidity nationwide or so oblivious that he had no idea that’s what he was doing. This particular participant was reduced to the character of a brusque, sarcastic New Yorker with an accent thick as cake icing.

Yet another thing that made Bernie tired.

He didn’t know. Had he changed, or had the world changed around him? Some days he barely recognized it. Like he’d been dropped off in a spaceship and was only going through the motions, trying to fit in, doing his best imitation of someone who belonged down here.

Everything had gone so cheap and gaudy and hollow. Buy a table these days, what you got was an eighth of an inch of pine pressed onto plywood. Spend $1200 for a chair, you couldn’t sit in the damn thing.

Bernie had known his share of burnouts, guys who started wondering just what it was they were doing and why any of it mattered. Mostly they disappeared not long after. Got sent up for lifetime hauls, got sloppy and killed by someone they’d braced, got taken down by their own people. Bernie didn’t think he was a burnout. At least not yet.

This driver after him for damn sure wasn’t.

All those pizza coupons he left for him reminded him of pizza and payback. He had started hated fucking pizza.

When it came right down to it, though, that was pretty funny, he thought.

 ***