Mr. Mafia had gotten typically drunk the night before. Where he suddenly had all this money to splash out on happy hour night after night was quickly becoming less and less a mystery. He’d spent the entire walk home from SomeBar bragging about his father, the great import Don of the entire upper west coast. Shipping from foreign countries. There was money in it. Alot of money. And if Patrick was free tomorrow, they could have some it. So here we were.
I cross my arms, forever cold in the unforgiving Seattle rain as Patrick and Mr. Mafia scurried back and forth, moving things from one storage unit to a different unit across the walkway. I want to ask. So badly do I want to ask. It burns how badly. I rock back and forth on my heels, holding myself against the sheeting wind, concentrating on how tightly I could keep my lips pressed together.
I was hoping I would actually get to meet Mr. Mafia’s much lauded father. This great import magnate. I imagined him with a marble cane, gold topped, ruling his seven sons and everything else with a commanding stoicism that rendered the world silent in his wake. This man who had forced his son into humility for his own salvation. This man of largess, with an even larger reputation. I was prepared to fall silent for him. I was disappointed.
We are finished and I watch Uncle Frankie slip Patrick a small stack of cash I know I will never see again. Uncle Frankie catches me watching and puts his arm around me, “Don’t worry beautiful, we’ll get you some pretty new clothes, huh?” But I’ve seen that episode of CriminalTVShow before. I get the pretty new dress, then new shoes I can barely walk in, the new pimp. I shrug him off and climb into the car next to Patrick. I avoid Uncle Frankie’s glances in the rear view mirror and focus on my lap, on my hands. On the fingernails that haven’t seen polish since I can’t remember when.
We pull up to the roadside motel we’ve been holed up in. Mr. Mafia spills out of the front seat and I vaguely think about how quickly and stealthily he manages to get shit faced every night. I hadn’t even seen him drinking.
“Let’s go to SomeBar” he tells Patrick as Uncle Frankie drives away.
“Hey guys can I just hang out here tonight and crash? You guys have a guys night out?” I am hopeful. I need a break. I need silence. I need the black void of sleep.
“No way!” Mr. Mafia says, quickly at my side to grab my arm. He propels me forward. “We can’t let you out of our site, a pretty little girl like you!” There is menace beneath his smile, his fingers dig into the underside of my flesh.
“I’ll lock the door” I suggest feebly.
“It’s not safe” Patrick says, staring ahead. He doesn’t see me. He can’t see the pleading look in my eyes. I am starting not to recognize him. I am starting not to recognize me. We begin to walk toward the bar.
“Do you know who you remind me of?” Mr. Mafia asks me for the fiftieth time since I met him.
I hate these conversations. Each time the conversation begins the same, but lately, it has taken a dark turn. I no longer want to hear about this girl I remind him of. It is becoming harder to convince him I am not her at the end of a night like these. “Lori,” I tell him. “I remind you of Lori. I’m not Lori”. I think Lori is dead.
“I think maybe you are Lori, and you’ve come back to me,” he announces. “I think you have come back…..” he pauses, getting louder. “I think you came back to FUCK WITH ME!”
I recoil and look around for Patrick as he draws the attention of everyone around us. He leans back laughing then leans forward again and whispers, “I’m going to call you Lori”.
“What happened to Lori?” I ask for the fiftieth time since I met him. I am afraid to look him in the eye.
“Lori,” he repeats. He grows very serious, studying his beer. I have to strain to hear him. “She’s gone.” I slide off my barstool and go searching for Patrick, finding him engaged in a deeply philosophical discussion about astrology with a brunette on the other side of the bar.
Mr. Mafia destroys my bag that night in the hotel room. He is enraged that I won’t give him my mother’s telephone number and address back home so he can always find me if ever I should leave. I want to leave. I want to leave now. Patrick by my side or not. I grab my bag and before I reach the door he is in front of me, tearing the bag off my shoulder, slamming me backward onto the bed and strewing my belongings across the floor. He grabs my blow drier, slams it against the wall. Picks up a shirt and begin tearing it at the seams, pulling off the buttons like a madman. The violence has me stunned, and I am frozen in place, half on the bed, half on the floor, terrorized. Patrick puts his hands out ineffectively, “Whoa, whoa dude, calm down!”
How is this just alcohol, I think. Time seems to slow and though I know there is so much noise happening I hear nothing but silence. It occurs to me that no policemen will be coming here to save me because, well, who is going to call them? The prostitute ring renting the room to the left? The non-english speaking Russians here on "business" in the room to the right? I pick up the nearest sharp piece of my broken hair dryer.
Mr. Mafia grabs his hair with both hands and half-screams, half-growls before storming into the bathroom and slamming the door. My brain kicks into action.
“Patrick let's go!” I beg as I scramble to gather my clothing and shoes from the room. “Please let’s go let’s go! Right now!”
“Ssshhhhh!” Patrick scolds me, grabbing my wrists. “We can’t leave right now, in the middle of the night! We have nowhere to go!”
“I don’t care!” I squeal! I am crying. I am prepared to go now, into the night without a dime in my pocket. Or a plan. I will sleep under a bridge. Again.
Mr. Mafia opens the bathroom door and we freeze like children caught in the pantry. He walks up to where I am crouched and stands there stiffly while I slowly look up at him. He is eerily calm. Too calm.
“I am sorry for my behavior,” he announces stiffly. He hands me his hair dryer. “I did not mean to break your things”.
Satisfied that I have been duly compensated, he turns his attention to Patrick and I am dismissed. I sit at the table under the dim pendant lamp with my back to the wall and my foot to the door and watch them pass a joint back and forth. Neither of them give me another glance.
“But don't you think he’s obsessed?” I ask Patrick two days later. We’ve been at Somebar for an hour and Mr. Mafia has just called me Lori again. “It’s like he can’t tell the difference between reality and I'm worried. I don't think it ended well for her and I don’t think it’s going to end well for me either. Especially since he seems to think I AM her!”
I’d given him an ultimatum earlier. We leave, or I do. Patrick takes another large gulp of cheap tap beer and shakes his head. He begins to slide off his bar stool at the exact moment Mr. Mafia begins to yell “Lori!” at me across the bar. I don't answer. He throws his beer at the wall behind the bartender and it shatters and we are thrown out.
This appears to be the last straw for Patrick. He waits until Mr. Mafia is sleeping that night before giving me the all clear. We slip out of the motel and into the cold black night.
It’s been a week and we still haven’t left SeaTac. We are practically just down the street from Mr. Mafia in another motel I’m convinced Mr. Mafia will check into at any moment. We have no plan and no prospects. Things are tense and we are fighting all the time.
“How about if I come with you tonight and keep you company,” I offer an olive branch. Patrick has been offered temporary labor from the labor center parking cars at the rental lot tonight.
“Won’t be able to spend much time together,” he replies without looking up. “I’ll be working the whole time. What would you even do”?
“I can read, hang out with you on breaks…”
I take his silence for a yes and so three hours later I am parked under a streetlamp on the car lot, reading in silence while he works. I haven’t seen him since he clocked in. Finishing a chapter I glance up and around. Because the air is always wet where we are, the headlamps of the traffic on the street look like glittering orbs and I watch them passing by, transfixed. A pair of headlamps looms past, slows, actually backs up in traffic, and pulls into the car lot.
I have no reason, no logical reason, to know this car is for us, but I do know and my heart begins to explode out of my chest. The Cadillac drives right past the normal customer entrance, fixed on our car parked like a neon sign directly under the light, and pulls into the empty space next to mine. I try to lock the door without being obvious but Uncle Frankie is already watching me with those squinting hawk eyes that don’t miss anything. He motions for me to roll down the window.
“Where is Patrick?” he asks. Mr. Mafia sits like a petulant child in the passenger seat, arms crossed, refusing to look at me. I motion to the parking lot.
“He’s working.”
“He is supposed to work with me. Tomorrow.”
I stay silent because I don’t know how to reply.
“Is he planning to show up?” Uncle Frankie demands to know. "We have a house to paint."
“He didn’t tell me anything about it. I don’t know.”
“Where you have been staying!” Mr. Mafia breaks his silence, leaning across Uncle Frankie to demand. Uncle Frankie pushes him back with his forearm, never breaking eye contact with me.
“You have him call me.” His voice is lower, icy. “You have him call me tonight!”
They throw the car in reverse and drive slowly away. I realize I have been holding my breath and exhale loudly. I don't see Patrick for the entirety of his shift. When I see him walking toward me I get out of the car and run toward him, spilling out what happened hysterically. I ask if he he’d been talking to Uncle Frankie behind my back. How else would they have had these plans after weeks of not seeing them? Patrick doesn’t answer me in a way that gives me any confidence he is telling the truth, but we leave for Seattle before sunup. I leave Seattle for Denver not long after, and though I will see Patrick again years later, I never again see Mr. Mafia.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Many many years later I am in SeaTac for business, on a road I suddenly realize I recognize. I pull into the parking lot of SomeBar and sit in the car, staring at the front door of this little tavern I never made peace with. I walk inside and sit down at the bar, ordering a beer. The bartender, an older man, serves the same brew on the same coaster. I slip the coaster into my purse.
“For memories,” I tell him. I ask him if he’s worked there a while. He has. Almost twenty years.
“Do you know a man, an older gentleman, goes by the name Wolfman?”
“Yeah yeah I remember the Wolfman!” the bartender chuckles. “Hell of a guy. He was a staple.”
“Was?”
“Yeah he’s been gone for a good ten years now. Heart attack. How’d you know him?”
I ignore the question. “Whatever happened to that crazy nephew of his?”
The bartender grins, remembering. “Ain’t been around since his uncle died. Never saw him again.”
I thank the bartender, tip him, and open the heavy wooden door, squinting into the sunlight.
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